Reality bites: How the pandemic has begun to shape the way we, metaphorically, see the world

Abstract

Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, there have been thousands of articles on the use of metaphor to describe the crisis. A Google search yields more than 7000 hits. Indeed, an avalanche of metaphors has already been used to describe the Covid-19 pandemic. From war and oceanic metaphors to the dreaded phrase ‘ramping up’, the language and images used by politicians, journalists, scientific experts, commentators, artists, comedians, and meme-makers to understand the crisis are not neutral constructs. But far more disappointing than the use of inappropriate or politically incorrect metaphors is the fact that there is no single scholarly article that systematically studies the influence of the pandemic on cognition, especially metaphorical conceptualization. That is, how has the coronavirus pandemic changed the meaning of home, love, Halloween, social media platforms, and so on for us? Technically speaking, how has the crisis triggered, prompted, or simply facilitated the selection and employment of particular conceptual metaphors or their linguistic and non-linguistic manifestations? This article, based on a large-scale corpus of political cartoons, aims to answer that question – how the pandemic itself becomes a metaphor. I show that various different metaphor targets (including WAR, ISRAEL, TURKEY, DONALD TRUMP, BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ARAB DICTATORS, THE KUWAITI NATIONAL ASSEMBLY, THE JORDANIAN CABINET, THE IRANIAN REGIME, MILITANT GROUPS, POVERTY, RACISM, CALENDAR, CORRUPTION, INJUSTICE, RUMORS, POLITICAL ASSASSINATIONS, THE GLOBE, THE UNION JACK, THE EUROPEAN UNION, THE US FAR RIGHT, THE 50 STARS OF THE AMERCAN FLAG, US-RUSSIAN RELATIONS, HOUSEWIVES, PERSONAL BELONGINGS, LOVE, QURBAN BAYRAM, CHRISTMAS, HALLOWEEN, ARABIC DRAMA, SCHOOL BAG, AWARENESS, and SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES such as Facebook, among many others) are all explained with reference to coronavirus-related terms or the source domain of CORONAVIRUS/VACCINATION. The sheer frequency of occurrences of CORONAVIRUS metaphors (a total of 175 out of 497 relevant multimodal cartoons, that is, more than 35%) demonstrates and makes a case for the necessity to examine the effect of context, in particular topical news and physical circumstances, in the cognitive linguistic study of creative metaphor. In short, the results provide initial evidence that new viruses and diseases such as Covid-19 have a negative and significant effect on cognition (or shape societies’ worldviews).