The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Essays / personal

Metaphor Hacker

metaphorhacker.net

Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas

Essays / personalScience

’10’15’20’25
Posts
82 from 18 Jul 2010 to 24 Aug 2025
Posting
now and then
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://metaphorhacker.net/rss.xml

2025 1

  1. Schemas and Propositions: What and where I've been writing and what's next

2023 1

  1. Narrative vs Ruminative Sense making: The Mind Red in Tooth and Claw

2022 4

  1. Improving academic writing: Four books to read during #AcWriMo
  2. Unintentional Pygmalions: 4 questions to ask when checking an artificial entity for sentience and how to think about the answers
  3. Learning is a Journey: Consequences of a metaphor
  4. 3 fundamental problems of translating metaphor (or anything else)

2021 5

  1. World as a directly meaningful place: A comment on Ecological Psychology and the richness of human experience
  2. History as weather: A fractal theory of history for Ian Morris, Jared Diamond and CGP Grey
  3. Why I am a feminist: A reading list
  4. The nonsense of style: Academic writing should be scrupulous not stylish
  5. Metaphors and freedom: On Tolkien's notion of allegory vs applicability

2020 4

  1. No back row, no corridor: Metaphors for online teaching and learning
  2. It’s not personal, it’s family: Kin, strangers, guests, and the complexity of social obligation
  3. How to actually write a sentence: The building blocks of written language
  4. Potemkin wisdoms, phronesis and Pixar: How wise sayings protect us from meaning

2019 8

  1. So you think you have a historical analogy? Revisionist history and anthropology reading list
  2. Turing tests in Chinese rooms: What does it mean for AI to outperform humans
  3. Fruit loops and metaphors: Metaphors are not about explaining the abstract through concrete but about the dynamic process of negotiated sensemaking
  4. 5 books on knowledge and expertise: Reading list for exploring the role of knowledge and deliberate practice in the development of expert performance
  5. Writing as translation and translation as commitment: Why is (academic) writing so hard?
  6. 5 kinds of understanding and metaphors: Missing pieces in pedagogical taxonomies
  7. Explanation is an event, understanding is a process: How (not) to explain anything with metaphor
  8. What would make linguistics a better science? Science as a metaphor

2018 9

  1. Cats and butterflies: 2 misunderstood analogies in scientistic discourse
  2. 3 burning issues in the study of metaphor
  3. 3 “easy” things that are hard for both humans and AI
  4. Innovation is bad for business: 3 more ‘I’ words to compare innovation to
  5. Does machine learning produce mental representations?
  6. Not ships in the night: Metaphor and simile as process
  7. How to read ‘Women, Fire and Dangerous Things’: Guide to essential reading on human cognition
  8. Therapy for Frege: A brief outline of the theory of everything
  9. 10 ways in which music is like language and 8 (more important) ways in which it is not

2014 6

  1. What language looks like: Dictionary and grammar are to language what standing on one foot is to running
  2. Anthropologists' metaphorical shenanigans: Or how (not) to research metaphor
  3. What does it mean when words 'really' mean something: Dismiss the Miss
  4. What is not a metaphor: Modelling the world through language, thought, science, or action
  5. Linguistics according to Fillmore
  6. 5 things everybody should know about language: Outline of linguistics' contribution to the liberal arts curriculum

2013 8

  1. Binders full of women with mighty pens: What is metonymy
  2. Three books of the year 2013 and some books of the century 1900-2013
  3. Pervasiveness of Obliging Metaphors in Thought and Deed
  4. Storms in all Teacups: The Power and Inequality in the Battle for Science Universality
  5. Sunsets, horizons and the language/mind/culture distinction
  6. How we use metaphors
  7. Do we need a gaming literacy: Literacy metaphor hack
  8. Framing and constructions as a bridge between cognition and culture: Two Abstracts for Cognitive Futures

2012 7

  1. The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about linguistics [updated]
  2. Cliches, information and metaphors: Overcoming prejudice with metahor hacking and getting it back again
  3. Pseudo-education as a weapon: Beyond the ridiculous in linguistic prescriptivism
  4. Character Assasination through Metaphoric Pomposity: When one metaphor is not enough
  5. Who-knows-what-how stories: The scientific and religious knowledge paradox
  6. RaAM 9 Abstract: Of Doves and Cocks: Collective Negotiation of a Metaphoric Seduction
  7. 21st Century Educational Voodoo

2011 20

  1. Moral Compass Metaphor Points to Surprising Places
  2. There's more to memory than the brain: Psychologists run clever experiments, make trivial claims, take gullible internet by storm
  3. The death of a memory: Missing metaphors of remembering and forgetting?
  4. Killer App is a bad metaphor for historical trends, good for pseudoteaching
  5. Language learning in literature as a source domain for generative metaphors about anything
  6. You don't have to be a xenophobe to think Britain being an island matters, but it helps!
  7. The natural logistics of life: The Internet really changes almost nothing
  8. When is subtle manipulation of data a flat out lie? Truth about Chinese prisons [UPDATE]
  9. I object: A male feminist's view on the Duchess of Cambridge's Wedding dress
  10. Poetry without metaphor? Sure but can it darn your socks?
  11. Religion, if it exists, is negotiation of underdetermined metaphoric cognition [UPDATED]
  12. Life expectancy and the length and value of life: On a historical overimagination
  13. Why don't metaphorical hawks kill metaphorical doves?
  14. Are we the masters of our morality? Yes!
  15. Comedian identifies a critical flaw in structuralism: Are distinctive features like leather sleeves
  16. Epistemology as ethics: Decisions and judgments not methods and solutions for evidence-based practice
  17. Do science fiction writers dream of fascist dictatorships?
  18. The brain is a bad metaphor for language
  19. Literally: Triumph of pet peeve over matter
  20. The most ridiculous metaphor of education courtesy of an economics professor

2010 9

  1. Philosophers’ songbook #philbitescomp
  2. Metaphor is my co-pilot: How the literal and metaphorical rely on the same type of knowledge
  3. The Tortoise and the Hare: Analogy for Academia in the Digital World?
  4. Why Chomsky doesn't count as a gifted linguist
  5. Why ideas aren't enough to solve the Palestine-Israeli conflict
  6. I write like… a new more sophisticated stripper name?
  7. What it's not about so much about
  8. Hacking a metaphor in five steps
  9. What it’s all About