Link

Last Friday, I went to see three presenters from the organization LiNK (Liberty in North Korea) come and speak at school. While I was not able to stay for the entire presentation, I got to see their latest documentary film, Hiding. It followed this man and his team who went to China to rescue North Korean refugees that were constantly living in hiding for fear of being repatriated to North Korea. The film was really well done and extremely powerful. It did an excellent job showing the difficulty of leaving behind your family, your home, your country. Still, it is hard to imagine what it is really like to be forced to break the links you have with your homeland and loved ones.
Link is the word I want to focus on in my blog today. Our links - our relationships, our thoughts, our connections - are essential pieces of our humanity. Links to other people, especially family and close friends, can have a huge impact on a person's identity. Who we associate with, who we admire, who we love shapes who we are and how we view the world. In the realm of lanuage, links have a profound impact on our worldview as well. The way we see things is greatly dependent on our thought linkage. A big method of linking our ideas and thoughts is through metaphor. We have been discussing this recently in English class and it is becoming more and more evident that a large part of our conceptual system is metaphorical. Some quick evidence includes the convential metaphors linking Argument + War, Love + Flame and Immigration + Dangerous Waters. These metaphors are vehicles that do not only affect the way we describe their tenors, but affect the way we act and percieve them as well.

For example, illegal immigration is often described as as a flood of people coming into our country. By describing the phenomenon in this manner, we are...
#1 denying the immigrants human status
#2 emphasizing the danger of possible negative effects they may or may not have on our livelihoods
#3 overlooking the possible benefits of immigration
Another example of a metaphor affecting the way we think is the Argument as War metaphor.
When we say things like "defend your position," "attack his argument" and deem an argument as something that can be won or lost, our idea of arguing takes on a specific shape. Linking argument and war in our minds has big implications where we percieve argument as a battle, a competition.

The power of links is not something to be underestimated.

*This is actually a really interesting topic and you can read more about it in the section written by Otto Santa Anna in the book http://www.amazon.com/Whats-Language-Got-Keith-Walters/dp/0393978842 (actually a great book about language that brings up some other very good issues as well, perhaps I'll discuss them another time).