Metaphors of Space

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In 1884, a conference in Washington, DC established twenty-four time zones across the globe. This development was spurred in part by the need for standard railroad schedules, and its implementation was made possible by the telegraph, as the time was transmitted from telegraph offices.

Steven Pinker (Canadian-American psychologist and scientist, born 1954) writes that all human languages share common metaphors of space and force. For example, in the phrase "the meeting is at 3:00" the word "at" is a spatial metaphor. We use concrete terms to express abstract concepts. In this case, it is the correspondence of an event (the meeting) with a time (3:00). Pinker postulates that this is because our ancestors had evolved sophisticated reasoning mechanisms for space and force, and as language developed, the pressures of evolution reused these neural circuits to help us reason more abstract concepts such as time. But this points to a failure in language noted by Friedrich Nietzsche (German philosopher, 1844-1900) that, in fact, all language is abstract and we cannot ever hope to know the outside world through language.

See Also

• Metaphors of Space
• Bolter
• Davies
• Concrete Poetry
• Memory and Space
• Cyberpunk
• Romantic Time
• Canning
• Minsky