Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 3; May 1999

Culture and metaphor - a view from the corpora

A few miles from the Pilgrims HQ lies the town of Dover, one of whose many "heritage" attractions is its ancient gaol (somehow this antique spelling seems more in keeping than the racier "jail"). Among the gruesome exhibits is a treadmill, an ingenious Victorian form of punishment on which prisoners doing hard labour would be forced to spend most of the day, for months and years on end. (It was a regime like this that broke the health of Oscar Wilde at Reading Gaol.) Not surprisingly, the word treadmill has become a metaphor for an unrelenting and repetitive routine with no productive outcome, and if you look at a concordance for treadmill on the BNC (British national Corpus), you find that a clear majority of its 109 uses on the corpus describe a metaphorical treadmill. For example:

Families driven to the cities found themselves tied to a treadmill of existence that involved the entire family working, quite literally, night and day.

Context is always instructive, and a glance at the most frequent collocating verbs gives a clue as to what is probably the crucial feature of a treadmill: the idea that you are on it against your will, and that it is inescapable. The two sets of verbs most commonly appearing around treadmill are "be on", "find yourself on", and "be trapped on"; and "get off", "save from" or "rescue from", and most common of all "escape from":

They frequently work in declining industries lacking effective unions so that their prospects of escaping the low pay treadmill are slim.

But here's an interesting thing. The BNC was completed in the early 1990s, and most of its constituent texts are at least 10 years old. Looking at a more recently assembled corpus of US newspaper texts, we find that around half of all the uses of treadmill are for a quite different meaning, for example:

Clinton recently posed on a treadmill to demonstrate his vitality

the 30-year-olds running on treadmills equipped with individual TVs

The reference here is to a fitness machine found in most gyms, which rather surprisingly, in view of the word's negative connotations is also called a treadmill. (The US is full of stressed executives who get in their cars and drive to a gym, where they then simulate walking and cycling.) The real change here is not so much in the nature of the machine itself, but in the fact that its use is voluntary no-one forces you to be on this type of treadmill, and nothing prevents you "escaping" from it. Now, since metaphors tend to originate from well-established literal meanings, we might expect to find this more positive use of treadmill generating its own figurative uses. And indeed the US news corpus does contain a line hinting at this possibility, when it refers to a business that is embarked on "the biggest continuous improvement treadmill of them all". This shift from the idea of "hard work as endless drudgery" to the notion that "hard work brings rewards and improvement" reflects profoundly on changes in the Anglo-Saxon economies over the past 20 years, and there is enough data in the corpora to give sociologists a field day.

We already know that changes in the language mirror changes in culture, society, and technology. What the "history" of treadmills shows is that corpus data through its sheer volume throws a spotlight on these changes and helps us track them far more effectively than we could before.

Still on the subject of language and culture, I was involved two or three years back in the planning stages of the new edition of the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (2nd edition 1999), a dictionary that aims to explain the wide range of cultural, literary and encyclopedic allusions that can crop up in any English text. One of the challenges here was to find ways of extracting relevant information from corpus data, and one approach that looked promising was to identify regularly-used formulae like:

It would be like putting King Herod in charge of a kindergarten

where successful decoding depends on the reader not only knowing who Herod is (and indeed which Herod is being referred to), but recognising an implicit reference to Herod's "slaughter of the innocents". In other words, when speakers allude to a particular event, person, or institution in contexts like this, the focus is often on one specific "iconic" aspect. A number of search routines were devised to help uncover such phenomena, including three that I would recommend anyone with access to a corpus. Searching for any of the following strings produces some interesting results:

like something out of X
a cross between X and Y
make(s) X look like Y

In a typical case, a speaker may cast doubt on someone's intelligence by saying they "make Forrest Gump [seen as quintessentially dumb] look like Albert Einstein [an iconic genius]", or perhaps now "like Stephen Hawking". At the simple level, you find things such as "it was like something out of a Marx Brothers sketch", which most advanced learners wouldn't have too much trouble decoding; while at the other end of the scale are lines that would mystify just about anyone, like "Jackie looked like a cross between a convict in leg irons and a pipecleaner man stuck in a pencil sharpener". But there is a solid core of material that helps us identify many of the key elements of cultural reference. A couple of examples will have to do:

[a private hospital where] the nurses were all like something out of Baywatch

Her dressing room [was] like a cross between Interflora, Kew, and Barbara Cartland's bedchamber

Do try this at home!

Michael Rundell is a lexicographer, and has been using corpora since the early 1980s. As Managing Editor of Longman Dictionaries for ten years (1984-94) he edited the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987, 1995) and the Longman Language Activator (1993). He has been involved in the design and development of corpus materials of various types, including the BNC and the Longman Learner Corpus. He is now a freelance consultant, and (with the lexicographer Sue Atkins) runs the "Lexicography MasterClass", providing training courses in all aspects of dictionary development and dictionary use (see http://ds.dial.pipex.com/town/lane/ae345).