VII. Language Series: PowerMetaphor™
The concept of powermetaphor™ doesn’t necessarily need to be applied only to
a word or phrase. Many are based on a kind of visual shorthand.
Smiley faces are said to have been invented by Kevin MacKenzie on April 12,
1979. MacKenzie, a newcomer to the Msg Group (one of the early collaborative
partners in ARPAnet development), anguished over the “loss of meaning” in the
textually-bound communications mode of email. He says that after reading an
old copy of Reader’s Digest, he got the idea that particular email sentences
could be punctuated with meaning marks to indicate how they were to be
understood: i.e. tongue-in-cheek, with laughter, just-kidding, sarcastically.
etc*. The first smilies were born :-}
What’s the functional metaphor in smilies? They are stand-ins for the human
face. They are officially called emoticons -- a combination of the two words
‘emotion’ and ‘icon,’ a term that had already been commandeered to name the
graphical representation of items on a computer “desktop.” (Desktop is
another excellent example of a powermetaphor™).
Another, now completely taken-for-granted, powermetaphor™ that has catapulted
an abstract concept into mainstream consciousness is the @ sign. This sign
functions as a kind of a metaphor because it substitutes the concept of
location in the physical world (at) into a virtual address, making the email
address format (and protocol) perfectly understandable to non-techies. To
reach me, just send mail to cgable@axioun.com -- my name is my mail box and I am at or on “Axioun” street. It was a simple and brilliant solution to a very complex problem.
Next week, the use of powermetaphors™ in effective speaking.
* taken from Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon's Where Wizards Stay Up Late, The
Origins of the Internet, 1996, Simon & Schuster.
