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Article: Mapping metaphor: this is your brain on figurative language.
- Article from:
- The Humanist
- Article date:
- July 1, 2008
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2008 American Humanist Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"Children may not understand political alliances or intellectual argumentation, but they surely understand rubber bands and fistfights."--Steven Pinker, from The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature (Viking, 2007).
SOMETIMES A CIGAR is just a cigar. Then again, mischief is the hot smoke that curls off the end of a lit intellect. And sometimes a diamond in the rough is indeed just an ancient deposit of highly compressed carbon. But no facet of humanity's evolved "genius" as Aristotle put it more than 2,300 years ago, sparkles so brilliantly as our unique capacities for extra-literal description and comprehension. ...