The Language of Dialogue: Embracing New Metaphors
What is the first language you learned how to speak? How did that language teach you to see others, to think about yourself and your place in the world? From whom did you learn it, and how well did you mimic it?
The version of myself I met in Holland was a revelation to me. I was 16 years old and living there as a foreign exchange student sponsored by the Rotary Club. I grew up in rural northern Michigan, the third child in a working-class family of seven daughters. Before that year in the Netherlands, I had never been on an airplane before, or even been on a vacation. I had never used public transportation or an ATM. I had never directly interacted (as far as I knew) with a Jewish person, a Black person, a Middle Eastern person, with most of the varieties of non-white and/or non-Christian people who make up the majority of people on this earth. I was the opposite of worldly, which was a word my parents used pejoratively, with deep scorn.
I was not aware of myself, or seen by others where I was from, as naive, innocent, or ignorant, however. I was seen as whip-smart and funny in a quick, sarcastic, cutting way. I had always been praised for my abilities with language, and it was the core of my identity in the world: I was hyper-articulate, with a rare vocabulary, an exceptional reader and writer. In fact, the worst of my bullying – the three performances I look back on with deep and enduring shame – all happened in writing. One of them: I was a pioneering internet troll in the very early days of the internet, leaving absolutely senselessly nasty comments on a website some unknown young couple across the country had made to share updates on their new baby, a homespun HTML scroll through pixelated photos of a chubby, smiling infant and bright colored Comic Sans descriptions of milestones on top of cloud-patterned blue wallpaper. I could not tell you, then or now, why I randomly selected this unknown young family to target. When my mother discovered what I was doing she lost her breath. She searched for words, and then she said, simply, with a kind of helpless grief, “Sometimes, I just don’t know what kind of person you’re going to become.”
***
I think (I hope) that it would shock most of my colleagues and students of the past twenty or so years to learn that I was ever cruel in this way, especially in a consistent way. But cruelty and supremacy was the dominant language spoken in my home – not the only one, but the dominant one, wielded most powerfully by my father, who governed our household as a violent authoritarian regime. He had learned this language in turn from his own mother. They both knew how to deliver the most expertly cutting, razor-sharp mockery: a few words, in the right tone, landing at the most vulnerable moment, placed to cause a lifetime of quiet, invisible hemorrhaging. My dad could do this because he was a self-proclaimed wordsmith, a master of language. Because he considered me one too, I enjoyed some degree of relative privilege in our family. I learned that there was reward to be found in reproducing his language with speed, precision, and force. When my school would reach out to my parents with another instance of my bullying, my mom would wince, but my dad would roar with laughter. He’d chide me, but chuckling, his pride in my cleverness evident.
Adapting to the dominant language is what we all do. By “dominant language,” I mean the most powerful, important, or influential language used in a given context: the language spoken by those in power. And by “language,” I mean both the explicit, named system of communication (English, Arabic, Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi) and the mode of communication: the patterns and habits of expression within that system that are used by those in power, often operating implicitly, even invisibly. Language is thus both the what (the grammatical and lexical systems) of our communication and the how (the common idioms, the structuring metaphors, the nonverbal elements). Accessing power, belonging, recognition, and even survival depends on our ability to learn the dominant language and use it.
None of these ideas are new, or were invented by me. But as a dialogue practitioner, a trained scholar of Comparative Literature, and a longtime teacher of language, including English as a Second Language and Spanish as a Second Language, I am always relearning them, with layers of nuance and complexity and new revelations about myself added each time. I want to use this space to think, in particular, about these questions:
What characterizes the dominant language enforced in our present context? What are the implications of this dominant language for our dialogues with one another? How does the dominant language shape how we understand our learning, our interactions, and our transformations? And, what are the alternatives?
I use the story of my year in the Netherlands as a junior in high school throughout this reflection to illustrate some of these questions, and I’ll return to it in a moment. First, though, I want to start to offer some answers to the first couple of questions above. I spoke of cruelty and supremacy (the illusion of superiority, of being better than other people) as the dominant language in my home. But the more I have taught English, and the more I have learned other languages and thus, through both these experiences, had the opportunity to examine the language I was educated in with more detail, the more I have realized that this language was not particular to my home or my father (though I believe he spoke a particularly harsh dialect).
In fact, the language of supremacy, of domination, power, and control, is woven all throughout the English that we all speak in the contemporary U.S. – even those of us who consider ourselves peace-loving, non-authoritarian, and non-oppressive, who present a much gentler face to the world than my dad (or I) did. In Metaphors We Live By, their landmark 1980 work of linguistic anthropology, the British scholars George Lakoff and Mark Johnson present the central thesis that “most of our ordinary conceptual system is metaphorical in nature” (4). That is, most of what we express in language, we express in the form of metaphors. This goes largely unacknowledged, Lakoff and Johnson suggest. For example, the word “express” literally means to squeeze a substance, usually a liquid, out of a body or object by applying pressure – olive oil, orange juice, and pus from a pimple are expressed. We do not literally express thoughts and feelings, but we are also not generally aware that we are speaking metaphorically when we talk about “expressing ourselves.” And metaphor comes to us from the Greek μεταφορά (metaforá), meaning transportation – the word metaphor itself is a metaphor! One concept is used as a vehicle to transport the meaning of another. (Convey is another way to describe communication as a transportation effort.)
Therefore, Lakoff and Johnson teach us, carefully attending to which metaphors have been chosen to represent which concepts can reveal to us a great deal of what the speakers of a language value and believe, and how they interpret and behave in the world, how they interact with their environment and with each other. As the great Kenyan writer and scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes in his seminal Decolonising the Mind, “Language is. . .both a means of communication and a carrier of culture” (13). The languages that we learn to speak when we are young are formative; they do not reflect what we individually believe and how we individually behave so much as they teach us, collectively, how to believe and behave.
So what characterizes contemporary English? What are some of the most influential metaphors that structure how we perceive and experience the world? Lakoff and Johnson identify dozens of examples of “conceptual systems” that beg to be analyzed for what biases and systems of relative power they reveal (for example: “UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING,” like Do you see? Show me what you mean. He’s got a lot of blind spots. Make your argument more clear and transparent. Etc). It is the work of a lifetime to notice and name all of the conceptual systems that exist (and, I promise, once you start noticing metaphors, you will find yourself unable to stop).
One particular conceptual system, however, that seems to structure the most central themes at the heart of dialogue work and education is that of WAR AND DOMINATION. In the classroom, we talk about “mastering” a concept or a skill and “demonstrating mastery” through assessments. When we are succeeding, we are “killing it,” “crushing it,” “dominating” in our field. Slay! Successful people are “winners”; unsuccessful people are “losers.” When I first started teaching in U.S. public schools, after several years of experience teaching abroad, I was startled by the ubiquity of war metaphors to describe the work of teaching and other endeavors dedicated to social change and progress: I and my fellow teachers were continuously referred to as being “in the trenches” and “on the front lines,” “in the fight” for educational equity. Similarly, healers and service workers were “frontline” workers during the early phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our social justice movements “launch” initiatives, like bombs, hoping to “make an impact.”
And metaphors that evoke combat warfare, colonial expansion, and gun violence abound in the way that we talk about discourse itself. In fact, “ARGUMENT IS WAR” is the inaugurating conceptual system used to exemplify Lakoff and Johnson’s thesis in Metaphors We Live By. When we talk about dialogue as an endeavor – not just debate or argument, but our beloved dialogue work – we talk about “strategies for engagement,” about “gaining ground” and exploring “new territory,” about offering ideas and practices that “hit the mark,” are “right on target” and “on point,” and, when we’re not sure what is going wrong, “troubleshooting” to try to find causes and solutions. When there is conflict, we speak of “resistance” and “backlash,” “battleground” issues and “culture wars,” someone on “the other side” of an issue. A “hot-button” topic evokes a detonation device or alarm system, and it might activate a strong emotional response, even a trauma response – which we call being “triggered.”
Subconsciously, then, we are coached to understand and experience individual learning, collective social progress, and interpersonal communication as inherently competitive efforts of domination, power, and control, in which we will either win (at the expense of someone else’s loss) or lose (because of someone else’s victory). We internalize and reproduce supremacy behaviors of entitlement (believing other people owe us resources: time, labor, attention, compassion), dehumanization (we cannot afford compassion or recognition of the other’s equal humanity; the stakes are too high!), and self-centering (our feelings, our identities, our histories, our people, our struggles are the most important and most deserving of attention). These beliefs and behaviors are necessary to pursue warfare with any kind of conviction; within a conceptual framework of war, they are logical and justified. But “war” is not a natural or necessary way to understand anything but actual war. The ubiquity of war metaphors does not reflect anything inherent to human nature or behavior – only the Anglophone world’s cultural investments in dominion and supremacy. And it makes it very hard for us to pursue our learning, our attempts to make a better world, and our dialogues without conflating conflict with attack, necessary mistakes with unforgivable failure, compromise with concession, and softness with surrender.
This matters in a moment of increased actual warfare across the globe, intensely but often casually violent political rhetoric from across the spectrum, and profound polarization. The macro reverberates through the micro, and vice versa; the small choices we make in how we communicate with one another not only reflect and reproduce, but also reify larger structures and practices.
***
In Holland, at 16, I refused to speak English. I discovered for the first time what it felt like to be stupid, slow, stumbling with words. I am not sure exactly why I opted in to that; in a place like the Netherlands, it was definitely a choice: everyone spoke English, and it wrecked my relationship with my first host family there that I refused all their attempts to connect with me and care for me in my own language. Part of it was pride: I was going to learn Dutch, godverdomme (which became my favorite word in Dutch). I did learn Dutch, in record time, and was delighted by it: the soft, rolling, guttural sound of words like edelachtbare and nagellak, the phrasal verbs, the poetically unpoetic directness of it. But I was more delighted, and surprised, by who I was in Dutch. The words they used to describe me were not words that had ever been used to describe me, or how I had ever thought of myself: Spontaan. (Spontaneous.) Leuk. (Silly.) Schattig. (Cute.) Mooi. (Pretty.) And, over and over, more than any other word: Vrolijk (joyful). And, most shocking of all, lief. Sweet.
I liked this new person, and I loved being her. I leaned into her – dancing in the lunchroom at school while my new friends laughed, singing as I biked wobbily over cobblestoned bridges – and I found relief there. I banished the person I had been (or really was?) to another planet. It was easy not to be her, because I didn’t have access to any of her tools, and there was no one around to remind me, as my father often did, in the most violently misogynistic language you can likely imagine, of my inherent meanness and unlovability. Or, equally important, of my superiority and specialness. I didn’t have words, so I found myself smiling a lot; I couldn’t make sophisticated, clever jokes, so I made sillier, more slapstick ones; I was never going to be the smartest, quickest one in the room, so I released my need to be recognized as such. I cannot express how liberating this was. To get to be someone else, to speak another language, to flounder and fumble my way into a whole other way of living: what a gift.
***
There is also nothing inherently or necessarily violent about English as a grammatical and lexical system – the what of the language. (And, to be sure, there is nothing inherently or necessarily compassionate, nonviolent, or collaborative about Dutch as a language; actually, as another imperial language, it begs scrutinizing for traces of its own violent legacies.) The violence is in the how – the codes of communication that the systems are used to create and the structures of power that they perpetuate, via sneaky metaphors that shape our perception imperceptibly. As bell hooks writes in Teaching to Transgress (1994), “I know that it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines, how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize” (168-69). A few more examples of dominant languages that exist within, and are enforced through, English:
Toni Morrison, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), writes, “I am a black writer struggling with and through a language that can powerfully evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language,” producing “a master narrative [of white supremacy] that spoke for Africans and their descendants, or of them. . . . The master narrative could make any number of adjustments to keep itself intact” (x-xi; 50-51).
Dina Nayeri, who fled her home country of Iran as a child refugee, talks in Who Gets Believed (2023) of the education she received as a McKinsey consultant and Harvard MBA student in “the language of the trusted classes,” that is, the wealthy and powerful: “The basics: lock eyes, shake hands firmly, under-promise, over-deliver, repeat. . . .Dismantle skepticism by arguing against yourself. . . . Let the other side make your most important point for you. Say it with charts! Charts are familiar, comforting. And they can lie. . . .Embedded in these tactics is a self-belief that works only when it’s ingrained and unconscious, not mimicked: You don’t need them; they need you. Your value lies in your vast potential, so walk into every room potential first. . . . I came out of McKinsey with utter confidence in my every thought” (85-86; 248).
Derald Wing Sue, professor of education, writes in Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence (2015) of the language of Western academia as “characterized by objectivity, detachment, and rational discourse; empirical reality is valued over experiential reality”; in this language, “reductionism, separation, and isolation of variables” are “the ultimate means of asking and answering questions about the human condition. . . . These assumptions elevate the mind over the body (spirit and emotions) and dictate that classrooms should be conducted in a sterile, objective decorum devoid of feelings” (25).
What other dominant languages do you notice? What other conceptual systems and structuring metaphors shape the way that you have been taught to experience the world? What feelings are coming up for you as you are reading and thinking about this?
And what is to be done? Can we choose another way, invent other languages? I submit that we can. I think that this is, in fact, the core of the dialogic endeavor: to shift the how of our communication away from combat and domination towards radical love, mutuality, collective liberation and deep gratitude and respect. It is up to us to look for alternative metaphors and frameworks and work consciously to let them (re)shape how we perceive ourselves, others, and our interactions with each other. It is not easy work, especially when there is real, tangible reward – power, access to opportunity, belonging and recognition – to be found in assimilating and reproducing the dominant language. How do we do it? A few ideas:
- Work on what Paulo Freire (in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 1970) calls conscientização (literally “conscientization,” or the process of becoming critically aware). Notice the metaphors and habits of communication that make up the language(s) of dominance at work in your family, your workplace, your classrooms, political rhetoric, news media, social media, your community and activist spaces. Do the difficult work of exploring the influence these metaphors and habits have had on your own perceptions, behaviors, and relationships. Recognize, with humility, that none of us manage to grow up unaffected by the dominant languages in our environment. We all internalize and reproduce supremacy behaviors, regardless of identities or experience. And give yourself grace and compassion in this process.
This new resource from the SNF Paideia Program, “Metaphors Not to Live By: A New Language for Dialogue,” presents two deeply ingrained, ubiquitous conceptual systems in contemporary English (war + domination and the marketplace) and questions to think and talk about. Use it in the classroom or on your own!
- Read about other people’s process of conscientization and take heart and inspiration! All the writers and works I’ve named in this essay are wonderful places to start. Do you have additional recommendations? Share them in the comments! Besides affirming that you are not alone and possibly reflecting some of your precise experiences, they offer pathways of transformation and resignification. For example:
- Lakoff and Johnson share and invite alternative metaphors for discourse that are not war-based: they point out that discourse is also sometimes configured in terms of building (a “constructive” conversation; an idea “with no foundation”; etc) (102). And they offer, “Imagine a culture where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way” (5). These are only two alternative ways to think about, and approach, communication – what are others you can imagine?
- bell hooks offers, “I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirety, that we do not need to ‘master’ or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech.” She describes how she chooses to speak a non-dominant language with purpose, even knowing that she will not be wholly understood: “When I need to say words that do more than simply mirror or address the dominant reality, I speak black vernacular. There, in that location, we can make English do what we want it to do” (174-75). Dare to claim your own vernaculars, to make English work for you. Make space for non-dominant languages that you do not fully understand within dialogue (including the language of silence). Be curious about them. Have you ever done this? Or witnessed someone else doing it? What was the effect?
- Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o describes his process of recognizing how, in the mandatory colonial schools of Kenya, “English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. . . . The most coveted place in the pyramid and in the system was only available to the holder of the English language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom. . . . Thus language and literature were taking us further and further away from ourselves, to other selves” (12). Though he experienced great success within this colonial schooling system, he eventually shifted to writing primarily in his native language of Gikuyu, wanting the children of his community to have access to literature that did not “take them away from themselves.” Towards similar ends, Toni Morrison describes using a different language while still writing in English: “My vulnerability would lie in romanticizing blackness rather than demonizing it; vilifying whiteness rather than reifying it. The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to maneuver ways to free up the language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predictable employment of racially informed and determined chains” (x-xi). How might we “free up” our language, or use it to free ourselves and those like us? What are changes you might make in the way you communicate?
- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist, talks in Braiding Sweetgrass about the “grammar of animacy” reflected in the Potawatomi language, which recognizes the life and subjectivity inherent in nonhuman, and even nonliving, entities, like water, rock, and wind (55). She is not fluent in the system of communication of Potawatomi and thus cannot use it as her primary language, but she is intimately familiar with the grammar of animacy as a mode of communication and seeks consciously to teach it: “When I am in the woods with my students, teaching them the gifts of plants and how to call them by name, I try to be mindful of my language, to be bilingual between the lexicon of science and the grammar of animacy. Although they still have to learn scientific roles and Latin names, I hope I am also teaching them to know the world as a neighborhood of nonhuman residents” (56). What language(s) do you want not to forget, to speak and teach alongside the dominant language of your chosen field?
- Thus we can work, individually and together, to learn other languages (systems and modes) and invent new metaphors, and practice using them. It will feel strange, deeply vulnerable, and unnerving – the way actually using a less-comfortable language inevitably, and necessarily, does. I want to suggest that this profound discomfort is actually central to the endeavor. Allowing ourselves to feel out of our element, to venture where we are not “masters” and attempt to communicate in a way that others may not automatically understand or respond to, clumsily and inexpertly, making many mistakes, and continuing to try and fail, smile, apologize, and persist in the effort to connect – this is the actual alternative language. Not the system of communication (Gikuyu instead of English) or even, ultimately, the mode of communication (substituting dance metaphors for war metaphors in our meta-dialogue), but the willingness to release power and control in service of discovering something new about yourself and other people, of exploring a different way to live and relate to one another.
- This is the language of humility, curiosity, intentionality, community: the language of dialogue. There is no “mastery”; it is a never-ending process, with no final product. Fluency, as I always say to my language students, is fluid. Some days and moments you will marvel at how easily it flows: you are asking questions, listening deeply, decentering your identity and ego, feeling real compassion, holding space for your own vulnerability and others’, being mindful of your language, attuning to the other’s emotions, breathing through conflict, finding connection. Other days and moments you will struggle to produce a trickle, and, frustrated, you will fall back into the dominant language.
What if we are speaking the language of dialogue alone? It does not matter, says Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh in The Art of Communicating (2013). He writes, “Our communications will not be lost when our physical bodies are no longer here. The effect of our thinking, speech, and physical actions will continue to ripple outward into the cosmos” (142-43). Robin Wall Kimmerer likewise describes at times feeling silly, and a bit hopeless, spending so much of her time and energy in studying Potawatomi – a language with only 9 remaining fluent speakers on Earth: “Our teacher tells us not to be discouraged and thanks us every time a word is spoken–thanks us for breathing life into the language, even if we only speak a single word. ‘But I have no one to talk to,’ I complain. ‘None of us do,’ he reassures me, ‘but we will’” (52-53). If we commit to a new language (or insist on renewing old, forgotten, or marginalized languages), we may begin with only ourselves to talk to; but someday, sooner than we might hope, there will be others. It matters how we communicate, even if others are not responding in kind. If we build it, they will come; there are so many of us searching, hoping to be taught a new language, to be welcomed into a different world. We can be the ones to teach it, to build it. We do not have to wait.
***
There are a few ways to look at my year in Holland. One is that I wore Dutch like a costume, stepped into a role and played someone else while hiding my true, more complicated self – the self that once wrote a rap mocking a classmate’s weight and circulated it around to the boys, reveling in their praise. That once wrote and read aloud in English class a whole series of short stories viciously mocking another girl’s family with thinly veiled pseudonyms and exaggerated “redneck” stereotypes, while my seventh-grade classmates screamed with laughter and demanded more. That was my real self and I was running away from her, pretending to be someone else. A stranger.
Another way to look at it is that I became my true self, that this was who I always meant to be and finally had the freedom to be, and my Michigan self was the performance, a self-protective suit of armor sheltering a very sad, very hurt, and terribly ignorant person in an attempt to avoid further hurt and gain access, through a twisted and thorny path, to something that felt, briefly, in those moments of laughter and praise, like love. And that when I took this heavy, heavy costume off, and my wizened, cowering little self was exposed at last to sunshine, air, and gentle rains, I bloomed.
Of course, they are both true. I was, and am, both of those people. I chose to speak Dutch – chose to go into a completely new world – because I was, I realize, looking desperately for a new language, a different way to be. When I became a teacher to high school students years and years later, I had a special affinity for the “problem” kids, the ones other teachers and sometimes other kids talked about with eye rolls and disgusted sighs. My instinctive approach to these students was not to try to coach or counsel them into “fulfilling their potential” – to tell them they could be better people, in some future moment, if they just put their minds to it and tried. It was to exude my solid trust, here and now, that they already were “better” – that they, like me, like all of us, were silly, cute, loving, joyful, sweet as well as angry, arrogant, confused, hurt, cruel – because I knew that how we are seen is who we become. The scripts we are given become our own voice, at some point; the role we play solidifies into authenticity. What it takes is the offering of a new language, one that may feel clumsy and uncomfortable for a long time but that, from the first day, offers some blessed relief from having to use the old one. What it takes, too, is the choice to seek it, and to speak it.
