The point at which this route would touch Mumbai was to be decided when the feasibility report was prepared. […], […] Un artículo en el blog de la lingüista Brigitte Norlich recopila distintas metáforas para hablar de la COVID-19, y reflexiona sobre los aspectos que se enfatizan en cada una de ellas. We’re getting run over by two gray rhinos: coronavirus and climate change. And here is another one by @marcosbalfagon, Illustrator for El País on pulling down the curve together! Cookies help us to give you the best experience on our website. An electrical current supplied to the electromagnets and monitored by computers constantly changes the polarity of the coils, which allows the magnetic fields system to push and pull the train along the track. It is a last resort for many but in recent times some ‘wars’ have been perceived by many to also be of choice. […], Your email address will not be published. To use an old metaphor. It’s now 2 April 2020 and I just woke up and heard Sir Paul Nurse, Director of the Crick in London explain what his institute and many other smaller institutions like his have been doing about testing, a thorny topic at this moment. This was the key challenge in her speech; the chain is the object we must and are able to break. I would however like to invite you, dear reader, to let me know about any other metaphors, and there must be thousands, that I have overlooked. The Mumbai–Ahmedabad corridor, along with 5 other high-speed rail corridors, was introduced for a feasibility study in the 2009–2010 Rail Budget.A 650 km-long high-speed rail corridor was proposed to run from Pune to Ahmedabad via Mumbai. Judging by the draconian measures that have been introduced to quarantine tens of millions of people, restrict the return to work after the Chinese New Year, and shutter much of the Chinese economy, he was certainly not understating his determination.” There are thousands more…, War metaphors also marched into the UK discourse, once the government announced its action or battle plan. It also points out the risks of ignoring the early warnings in fiction as well as scientific studies. or “All the world's a stage” (Shakespeare). Even if we’re not fighting the fire directly, we all need to look after the land to avoid further disasters. Why was this metaphor not used more widely when people discussed cancelling or not cancelling large gatherings of people?! The “soon” at the end means a delay, … And one could look at Twitter where many are arguing against the war metapor – and as time passes, it’s now middle of April the arguments get stronger, good article by Talia Lavin; see also this article by Bec Sanderson and Dora Meade in The Ecologist from beginning of May, and this article Giulia Carbonaro from the middle of May which sums up the situation at that time). It’s now the end of April and I have heard the phrase ‘invisible enemy‘ yet again from the mouth of President Donald Trump. High-speed trains mostly operate on standard gauge tracks of continuously welded rail on grade-separated right-of-way that incorporates a large turning radius in its design, however certain regions with wider legacy railways, such as Russia have sought to develop a … “America’s top infectious diseases expert [Fauci] is warning that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die unless every citizen joins an effort to blunt the coronavirus pandemic — only to be contradicted by President Donald Trump, who insists the virus is under ‘tremendous’ control.”. The paper is a field of snow. bullet. The moon is a cookie. The following has become a rather unsystematic list, as I wrote the post on 16 March and have added to it ever since. Welcome to the Bullet Train! One headline in The Sun brought many aspects of the war metaphor together when it declared: “Army on standby as Boris declares war on coronavirus with battle plan to kill the deadly virus”. Now, why would he regard this metaphor as ‘alarmist’, a word so commonly used when climate scientists are rebuked for speaking out about another threat facing the world? The focus of the study is on the conceptual metaphors used in medical academic publications to portrait the flu as they seem to be the most semantically accessible linguistic units used by the media to transfer information from scientific discourse to the general public. We knew it was coming and we still were not prepared, medically, scientifically, and culturally, despite all the dystopian pandemic literature that have been circulating for ages [added: new article in The Conversation about this here!] than the big boat or ship of Public Health England which is supposed to coordinate testing centrally. š, pronounced [ɕiŋkaꜜɰ̃seÉ´], lit. Process-thinking and the question of pandemics | Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, No es lo mismo estar en guerra que remar juntos: la importancia de las metáforas sobre el covid-19, la importancia de las metáforas sobre el covid-19 - El Comercio Cotinental, No es lo mismo estar en guerra que remar juntos: la importancia de las metáforas sobre covid-19 – Otras miradas, Otras miradas - No es lo mismo estar en guerra que remar juntos: la importancia de las metáforas sobre COVID-19 - Articles Archive. ], Some people opposed the war metaphor. if a relay starts chain reaction, the whole society very quickly learns to be responsible and responsive. “Covid is the disease of stoppage, of ‘social distancing’, of ‘self-isolating’ (all these new terms that will no doubt find their way in the Oxford Dictionary very soon), of no-handshakes-no-hugs, no flights, no passing through. On Sunday, 15th March, Kenan Malik wrote an article on metaphors for The Observer. (Added 7 July) I have now written a whole post about that…. Those who exploit them to heighten panic and win obedience to authority should be dismissed from public office.” Similarly Simon Tisdall asks people to ‘lay off the war metaphors’, while using them himself quite liberally (HT @VeronikaKoller). The metaphors can be very helpful in capturing the complexity of a phenomenon and making it more comprehensible than otherwise. 1. bullet train - a high-speed passenger train. History Conception. One should also distinguish between metaphors used to sell policies and metaphors used to criticise policies…. [Added: They are now even more conspicuous in this strange document from Downing Street – which would deserve a separate analysis! See Privacy and Cookies for details. By this I mean metaphors trying to explain or make visceral the nature of the virus and the way the virus operates. meaning. They pile up on the platform. What do the Britain is not at war with coronavirus. What you’ve done here in this blog is really, really meaningful, especially in a time when language is often misused by people, including leaders all over the world. Governments want to be seen to take control and bring the virus under control. He might even be saying to take an ayahuasca trip to get through it and see … passenger train - a train that carries passengers. Regarding testing, puzzle metaphors (Boris wants scientists to ‘unlock the puzzle’) are creeping, see here. Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase takes on the meaning of another word or phrase to suggest a likeness between the two. There is now also something else creeping in, namely a policy of ‘surrender‘ here in the UK, where NHS workers are not tested….This is highly dangerous. A nice article in The Guardian by Nick Chater explores the different policy implications of the fire and tide metaphor of outbreak management! Somebody should also keep an eye on emerging symbols and alternative forms of communication, as putting green or red pieces of paper in your window indicating you are fine or you need assistance. Climate change is the fever, but the underlying disease is the unbridled consumption of Nature.”. Referring to the hat-shaped curve of the now famous flatting-the-curve graph, Boris Johnson introduced the metaphor of ‘squash this sombrero’ at the second press conference about the virus which actually used a representation of the flatten the curve graph in the background in order to make it more understandable. Prof Neil Gershenfeld of Massachusetts Institute of Technology put it best when he said that ‘building models is very different from proclaiming truths’. Unlike traditional wars, we do not have a choice: COVID19 is here and we need to fight it. I have just started to read that book – a good way of distracting myself from the ever-present thought of the novel coronavirus or Covid-19! Classified under: Nouns denoting man-made objects. Most importantly, we see many many rainbows, drawn mostly by children, pinned to windows, celebrating the NHS. They also play an important role in how we think and talk about health, illness and medicine and they shape how we act, individually and collectively. The first high-speed rail system, the Tōkaidō Shinkansen, began operations in Japan in 1964 and was widely known as the bullet train. Below we examine […]. From NES all the way to modern games. The paper investigates the academic medical discourse used by the media as the major initial source of information about the epidemic. (informal) Suicide by small firearm; see take the bullet train. The Novel Corona Virus is a global challenge, yet different countries respond in different ways when it comes to political decisions but also in the way the virus is described. Recently, Brigitte Nerlich discussed metaphors in the context of the current SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Because of diseases like cholera, we literally figured out how to handle our shit.”. Also a mash-up between Star Wars and the Downing Street ‘communication’, by @ojmason and @rennarda (based on seeing random uppercase words), empty shelves and an ambulance driver with a shopping basket!!! © 2003-2012 Princeton University, Farlex Inc. In his article, which all students of metaphor shoul… A japanese bullet train won't run on north american freight tracks, and likewise, a freight train would have a hard time balancing on the mag-lev bullet train tracks. Comment document.getElementById("comment").setAttribute( "id", "a662f1d7ffcaf8f0f7cf7e831eac2b53" );document.getElementById("fb4e49bc57").setAttribute( "id", "comment" ); Our site makes use of cookies. Initially, it was built to connect distant Japanese regions with Tokyo, the capital, to aid economic growth and development. The Danish expression corresponding to ‘breaking the chain’ uses the word ‘bryde’. We all have this disease, even if our bodies try to resist its full development. Sequence of Activities: Read a poem and discuss (10 min): Greet the class, and start right away talking about metaphor. On 6 March Morgan Lyons wrote in Metro that “Whack-a-mole is a lousy crisis strategy”. Read the below poem (give each student their own copy) and ask them to highlight any metaphors they find. I am glad there is now a bigger effort being coordinated by you and others on a shared spreadsheet. The contents of all posts on this blog constitute the personal opinions of the author only, not the Making Science Public research programme or the University of Nottingham. Thony Thorne, a linguist, also pointed in this direction at the end of April, when quoted in an article in The Financial Times).