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7

Personification

Perhaps the most obvious ontological metaphors are those where the physical object is further specified as being a person. This allows us to comprehend a wide variety of experiences with nonhuman entities in terms of human motivations, characteristics, and activities. Here are some examples:

His theory explained to me the behavior of chickens raised in factories.

  This fact argues against the standard theories.

  Life has cheated me.

  Inflation is eating up our profits.

  His religion tells him that he cannot drink fine French wines.

  The Michelson-Morley experiment gave birth to a new physical theory.

  Cancer finally caught up with him.

In each of these cases we are seeing something nonhuman as human. But personification is not a single unified general process. Each personification differs in terms of the aspects of people that are picked out. Consider these examples.

   Inflation has attacked the foundation of our economy.

Inflation has pinned us to the wall.

Our biggest enemy right now is inflation.

The dollar has been destroyed by inflation.

Inflation has robbed me of my savings.

   Inflation has outwitted the best economic minds in the country.

   Inflation has given birth to a money-minded generation.

   Here inflation is personified, but the metaphor is not

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merely inflation is a person. It is much more specific, namely, inflation is an adversary. It not only gives us a very specific way of thinking about inflation but also a way of acting toward it. We think of inflation as an adversary that can attack us, hurt us, steal from us, even destroy us. The inflation is an adversary metaphor therefore gives rise to and justifies political and economic actions on the part of our government: declaring war on inflation, setting targets, calling for sacrifices, installing a new chain of command, etc.

The point here is that personification is a general category that covers a very wide range of metaphors, each picking out different aspects of a person or ways of looking at a person. What they all have in common is that they are extensions of ontological metaphors and that they allow us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms---terms that we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics. View­ing something as abstract as inflation in human terms has an explanatory power of the only sort that makes sense to most people. When we are suffering substantial economic losses due to complex economic and political factors that no one really understands, the inflation is an adver­sary metaphor at least gives us a coherent account of why we're suffering these losses.