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Karen Sullivan Books

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“Until fairly recently, every family had a cornucopia of favorite home remedies--plants and household items that could be prepared to treat minor medical emergencies, or to prevent a common ailment becoming something much more serious. Most households had someone with a little understanding of home cures, and when knowledge fell short, or more serious illness took hold, the family physician or village healer would be called in for a consultation, and a treatment would be agreed upon. In those days we took personal responsibility for our health--we took steps to prevent illness and were more aware of our bodies and of changes in them. And when illness struck, we frequently had the personal means to remedy it. More often than not, the treatment could be found in the garden or the larder. In the middle of the twentieth century we began to change our outlook. The advent of modern medicine, together with its many miracles, also led to a much greater dependency on our physicians and to an increasingly stretched healthcare system. The growth of the pharmaceutical industry has meant that there are indeed "cures" for most symptoms, and we have become accustomed to putting our health in the hands of someone else, and to purchasing products that make us feel good. Somewhere along the line we began to believe that technology was in some way superior to what was natural, and so we willingly gave up control of even minor health problems.”

HealthMedicineHealth CarePhysiciansNatural RemediesPharmeceutical Industry
Book:The Complete Illustrated Guide to Natural Home Remedies
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“The ‘death’ of a metaphor is the loss of a connection between a metaphor and a specific word, not the loss of the conceptual metaphor itself. ‘Dead’ metaphors are words and phrases that were previously metaphoric, not conceptual metaphors that have disappeared. Conceptual metaphors generally ‘outlive’ the specific words and expressions that involve them.”

MetaphorMeaningConcept
Book:Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse
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“A great ruler, a great court, a great kingdom, these texts suggest never exist unto themselves, as stable, fully actualized entities, and, therefore, are never experienced in their plenitude in the present. Instead, they are always remembered as something that occured in the past or anticipated as something will reoccur in the future. Insofar as they are experienced in the current time, it is only for a brief and evanescent moment, overshadowed by the knowledge that it will soon vanish. For a realist, the fact that the excellence of a person, a place, or a time is not appreciated in its own time proves that it was never actually as excellent as it seemed. For a Romantic, however, there exist a people, places, and times whose excellence can only be appreciated Arthur always has to be - to quote the Alliterative Morte Arthure (ca.1400) - "the once and future king”

RomanceArthurian LegendKing Arthur
Book:The Danger of Romance: Truth, Fantasy, and Arthurian Fictions
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“Of course, the ‘living/dead’ nomenclature is itself a metaphor, in that it personifies metaphors as living beings that can ‘live’ and ‘die’. Like all metaphors, this personification metaphor is helpful in some ways but imperfect in others. It is useful because it allows us to think about ‘living’ metaphors as having some of the traits of living beings. That is, ‘living’ metaphors can be thought of as active, having effects, and able to cause changes. The personification metaphor also lets us effortlessly reason that ‘dead’ metaphors will not have effects or instigate changes. Nonetheless, in other respects the metaphor misrepresents the actual situation, because metaphors can be partly dead and partly alive.”

Dead Metaphor
Book:Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse
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