The sports metaphor in American cultural discourse

Abstract

Metaphor is one of the most distinctive and salient features of language. Nietzsche in fact took the metaphor so seriously that he considered it the basic principle of all language: so-called literal talk remained a sort of frozen sediment of metaphor.' Ortega y Gasset also valued the metaphor considering it, like Nietzsche, a principle component of reality: far from being the deformation of reality, it was rather its organization. As both Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset realized, the metaphor is nuclear rather than atomistic, an intellectual device that links rather than isolates the distinctive features of everyday experiences. It is therefore through rhetorical devices like metaphor that we communicate a common set of symbols; language, communication, symbolism and communal life become inseparable and interrelated components of an identifiable cultural perspective. As a result, culture becomes encoded in metaphor. One of the sources of metaphor, and hence one of the mechanisms by which our communal reality is mediated, is the world of sport. The language of sport 'sportspeak' as Robert Lipsyte once called it has penetrated our entire national language system. R. Palmatier and H. Ray, in fact, have identified as many as 1700 commonly used sports metaphors, taken from more than 100 games and sports ranging from boxing ('catch someone off guard') to bull-fighting ('take the bull by the horns'), cricket ('shiver my timbers') to rowing ('pull your weight'), polo ('come a cropper') to wrestling ('no holds barred'). The idea of sport as a metaphor for life ('life is a game') is so common in America and American literature that it has become a part of our conventional wisdom. But as frequently as we use the sports metaphor, often unwittingly, its omnipresence must be qualified by specificity. Metaphors from particular sports predominate in particular cultural discourses. The purpose of this article is to identify and account for the sports metaphors that dominate particular cultural discourses, often noting a change over time. In my analysis, I will uncover patterns of metaphor use and in so doing I will explore the nexus of shared values and assumptions that undergird our collective way of life. The four discourses I am most concerned with are warfare, politics, business and sexual relations, those discourses that have most readily embraced the sports metaphor.