America's tragic metaphor: Our twentieth‐century combatants as frontiersmen
- 1 February 1990
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Quarterly Journal of Speech
- Vol. 76 (1) , 1-22
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00335639009383897
Abstract
In the twentieth century, many Americans tended to view our wars metaphorically as extensions of this nation's earlier frontier experience. From an anthropological perspective, those figurative analogies for contemporary combatants as frontiersmen reveal how an apparent “truth of things” expressed by some metaphors provided our culture with “a pastness to the future that is fundamentally reassuring.” This longitudinal study traces “social functions” of those metaphors which have become, from an ethical perspective, tragic not only because of their false analogies but also for their lack of worth when compared to other, more responsible frontier metaphors.Keywords
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