Dead versus live metaphors in engineering writing
Parent: Mixed metaphors and catachresis as signs of reflexive figurative language · Published reference · snapshot 2026-09-23
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Source-anchored research for Dead versus live metaphors in engineering writing. Run status: COMPLETED.
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Structure and components
- Lakoff holds that conventional ('dead') metaphors are used constantly and automatically, without effort or awareness, yet still structure thought; his 1986 paper title 'The Death of Dead Metaphor' rejects the inert view. (medium confidence) [source]
How it works
- Career-of-metaphor theory: novel metaphors are processed by comparison, and with repeated use the base term gains a domain-general category sense, so processing shifts to categorization and gets faster. This gives a mechanism for deadness as a gradient. (medium confidence) [source]
- Because deadness is relative to reader and context, extending a dead engineering metaphor literally (for example, a bug that 'crawls') can revive its imagery; this is the point where dead metaphors start to collide. (low confidence) [source]
Comparisons and alternatives
- Scholars disagree on whether dead metaphors are dead: Max Black treats them as separate vocabulary items rather than metaphors, while R.W. Gibbs argues they retain metaphorical qualities, and Turbayne and Walton argue they keep influencing thought. (medium confidence) [source]
Facts and statements
- Orwell distinguishes a dead metaphor, one that has reverted to being an ordinary word, from a dying metaphor, one that has lost evocative power and is used without knowledge of its meaning; he objects to the dying kind, not the dead kind. (medium confidence) [source]
- Software bug and thinking-machine constructs such as if/then, call/return and while are cited as dead metaphors in engineering language; readers no longer picture a cockroach. (low confidence) [source]
- A position paper argues that resurrecting the literal origin of dead technical terms (upper case, leading, gutter, out of sorts from typesetting) restores evocative power and aids memory; it reports no empirical results. (low confidence) [source]
Children
- No children recorded.