[FRIAM] The metaphor in the room

[Steve Smith]

>  I don't want my last view of you to be waving your fists and  
> shouting, red-faced, some of the boneheaded things you have asserted 
> in your recent emails.  And if Icebergs echo, do you really want those 
> same utterances coming back at you.
>
Nick  -

I love the image of you shaking your tiny fist at the many shaking their 
tiny fists at you as you float off into the melting arctic on a large 
chunk of ice-floe...

As you must know... I'm a fan of all figurative speech, with metaphor as 
the term we often use loosely for all of it.  I am more fascinated with 
it as "epistemic scaffolding" for expanding/growing/building one's 
(individual/community) (shared) understanding of "life, the universe and 
everything".

Where I might share any disdain for the use of metaphor it is where (as 
asserted in a recent post by myself) a specific use of a metaphor as a 
compression of convenience for expression is conflated with it's use as 
an exploratory tool (epistemic scaffold), or as a means of "signaling 
insiderness" (reduced to jargon).

I hope to ride of on your ice-floe with you shaking *my* tiny fist at 
the philistines if I must!

- Steve