Cultural Change and Metaphors

Much of cultural change arises from the introduction of new metaphorical concepts and the loss of old ones. For example, the Westernization of cultures throughout the word is partly a matter of introducing the TIME IS MONEY metaphor into those cultures.

~ Lakoff & Johnson's Metaphors We Live By  

  This book has provided many insights along the way; but this one is of a different sort, one that talks about cultural change. The illustration is quite apt. Think of the many areas in which English-language speech is dominated by this particular metaphor. Look at how each of the following verbs can be followed by either 'time' or 'money';  spend, invest, waste, have, make, save, take, be worth, borrow, gain, lose, be out of ______. In other words, in English (not necessarily in England or America), time tends to be conceptualized metaphorically as analogous to money in many, many ways. Time is the abstract concept; money is the more concrete daily experience. Yet, what if we had a different dominant metaphor? What if we saw time as a gift or a river or a spring of water? We'd behave differently; we'd think differently. If time is a gift, being late to a meeting because you were giving that gift to someone who needed it more implies no disrespect to the person who had to wait a bit to receive the gift you were bringing to give them. 

  Explaining more, a bit later in chapter 21, Lakoff and Johnson say, "Each culture must provide a more or less successful way of dealing with its environment, both adapting to it and changing it. Moreover, each culture must define a social reality within which people have roles that make sense to them and in terms of which they can function socially. Not surprisingly, the social reality defined by a culture affects its conception of physical reality. What is real for an individual as a member of a culture is a product both of his social reality and of the way in which that shapes his experience of the physical world. Since much of our social reality is understood in metaphorical terms, and since our conception of the physical world is partly metaphorical, metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us." (all emphasis mine)