This map is not upside down

Re:This map is not upside down by kens on Thursday September 18, 2025 @04:59PM (#45294953)

I highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", which discusses how metaphors are not arbitrary, but are part of schemas. For instance, there are whole classes of orientational metaphors that fall into the schemas: "more is up, less is down", "good is up, bad is down", "virtue is up, depravity is down", "rational is up, emotional is down", "having control is up, being subject to control is down", and so on. (Yes, I'm sure you're clever enough to find counterexamples.) This is a thought-provoking book that changed how I view the world, so check it out.

The book: https://archive.org/details/lakoff-george-metaphors-we-live-...

Norvig's review discussing the book in the context of AI: https://norvig.com/mwlb.html

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Re:This map is not upside down by dingaling on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:02PM (#45294972)

> Metaphors We Live By

Unfortunately the editor didn't seem to read "Grammar By Which We Live" before entitling that book.

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Re:This map is not upside down by jaennaet on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:24PM (#45295173)

This is the sort of arrant pedantry up with which I will not put

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Re:This map is not upside down by ash_091 on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:20PM (#45295138)

I spent a solid ten minutes researching this and couldn't find any suggestion that there's any problem with the title.

Could you explain how it's ungrammatical?

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Re:This map is not upside down by cgh on Thursday September 18, 2025 @05:31PM (#45295255)

There’s an outdated rule in English that states you shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. It dates back to a time when writers applied Latin’s grammatical rules to English. It’s mostly ignored now.

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Re:This map is not upside down by tomsmeding on Thursday September 18, 2025 @06:26PM (#45295783)

But... it's a title, not a sentence. Many book titles are even a single word, which is even less a sentence. Why would a grammatical convention for sentences apply to book titles?

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Re:This map is not upside down by cgh on Thursday September 18, 2025 @08:38PM (#45296688)

Heck if I know. All I know is I am a lot more worked up about the misuse of “less” when the correct word is “fewer”.

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Re:This map is not upside down by robocat on Thursday September 18, 2025 @09:25PM (#45296964)

Whom would care fewer?

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Re:This map is not upside down by jamiek88 on Friday September 19, 2025 @03:09AM (#45298759)

Which itself was simply the preference of a spinster who wrote a grammar book.

English has no rules like that, only preferences.

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Re:This map is not upside down by marcusb on Thursday September 18, 2025 @06:16PM (#45295688)

They did, they just understood they were editing English not Latin.

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Re:This map is not upside down by Levitz on Friday September 19, 2025 @08:56AM (#45301163)

The problem is not considering them arbitrary or not. We are sure to derive expressions from reality in some way, I'm sure that many languages have different versions of saying that something is so boring it puts someone "to sleep", no matter if speech is not hypnotic, the human experience will relate the boredom with sleep.

The problem is when from that we derive, with little justification and with the by now widely recognized horrible standards of social science, that in those rationalizations lie very important hidden truths about our society and psychology.

Many things boil down to an implicit association test of some sort, and that's now considered basically junk science.

There's a pipeline in which basically anything that can be considered a social issue in some way can get picked up by someone in the social sciences whose biases it confirms and given a justification, and since it has a political backing and is powered by preconceived bias and academia it goes through and actually has a negative effect on the world.

The stupid Stanford prison experiment. Facilitated communication. Power posing. Trigger warnings. Learning styles. Priming. All bullshit. All popular. All part of "the science".

And people wonder why there's a problem of institutional trust.

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Re:This map is not upside down by 542354234235 on Friday September 19, 2025 @10:39AM (#45302189)

Or how some cultures see time "passing" like a progress bar filling up, while others see time filling up like a barrel, while other see time cycling, like the seasons. How English speakers would say they have a "long" meeting, Spanish speakers might say a "big" meeting. Our abstractions effect our perceptions.

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