dead metaphors

“Computer lab” is a dead but by no means powerless metaphor. As Arib and Hesse (1986) put it: “When a metaphor becomes entrenched in a language…it loses its literary point and becomes simply a new usage. This is the fate of dead metaphors, such as ‘spirits’ for whiskey, or ‘leaves’ for the pages of a book, or ‘fiery’ for a person’s temperament” (p. 153). In other words, metaphors are only “alive” (and typically visible as metaphor) as long as they maintain an ironic distance from the things they signify. When the signifier actually becomes the sign, the metaphor dies. Though "laboratory" has undeniably scientific origins, we don't hesitate to apply this term to networked places in which writing—an art—is taught because this metaphor is dead. A dead metaphor, however, is not without force. Tracing the evolution of the organic metaphor--the “organism of the state”-- within Latin American geopolitics, Leslie W. Hepple (1992) maintained that dead metaphors can still influence social relations and intellectual visions and operate as “mental prisons” (p. 142-143). Dead metaphors retain the power to filter impressions of things, people, and, most important for my purposes here, places. And they do so without calling attention to their figurative, interpretive nature.