Talking outside the box

Deborah Cameron is impressed by The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker's accessible study of semantic meaning; this story in the Saturday Guardian.

The Stuff of Thought: Language As a Window Into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker499pp, Allen Lane, £25 NZ$65(H/C) NZ$40 (Pbk)

Would you feel better about paying your taxes if they were renamed "membership fees"? The US linguist George Lakoff thinks you might. Lakoff believes that political debates are essentially contests between different metaphorical frames. He has criticised the Democrats for jumping on George Bush's "tax relief" bandwagon during the 2004 presidential campaign, on the grounds that "tax relief", which frames taxes metaphorically as an affliction or a burden, is an apt slogan for neoconservatives, but a self-defeating one for their opponents. If the Democrats want to win the argument, what they need to do is reframe the issue using a different metaphor - for instance, taxes are what we owe to society in exchange for the services it provides to its members.

The full review here. New Zealand publication 29 October.