Metaphorically Challenged : Terrible Mother on Offsprung.com “That is an awesome metaphor,â€? I said. Because it is. It’s funny without the use of burning children. But it isn’t accurate. John isn’t on some emotional island where he can’t understand what he’s doing. And he isn’t trying to fight, really. He doesn’t want to be inconvenienced. He doesn’t want to step up. He is, basically, an inadequate father. And I haven’t found a metaphor, war or otherwise, that says it any better. [my emphasis]

This is a rather interesting self-reflective observation (apart from the rather compulsively good writing) for a writer whose stock in trade is the creative analogy (generative metaphor). And reflective of something most metaphor theorists tend to neglect. What happens if there is no good metaphor? Metaphors are frequently presented as omni-present and unlocking this or the other of our mind. But just as often people turn away from outward metaphor or try to eliminate the metaphoricity of one and come up with a "literal" description. Of course, by conceptual metaphor standards, the statement in bold is frought with metaphors of all kind but the explicit desire of the author is to reject metaphor for something identified (through a folk theory of literal meaning and the ornamental nature of figurative language) as a 'down-to-earth' description of life 'as it is'. That doesn't invalidate the ubiquity of metaphor theory (which is really a 'centrality of conceptual integration' theory) just shows that there are different levels of magnification that we need to operate on. The writer rejects the generative (educational) metaphor and simply settles for integrating scenarios of fatherhood with her narrative depiction of events and describing the results in the normal attributive manner. What is interesting, is that the standards of fatherhood are implied in the preceding narrative (not cited here) in interesting ways that would bear further investigation. Clearly, something cognitive is happening at the level of discourse rather than the smaller chunks of perception cognitive psychology of text generally operates on.