The Switch : Metaphorical Representation of the War in Iraq From September 2002 – May 2003

Résumé

In this article, I introduce the term the switch which I define as a rhetorical strategy using metaphor to enact a simultaneous two-way, semantic shift. While one thing is transformed into another, other things are transformed into the former element. The idea that such a metaphorical switch may operate in language first came to me while reading the English press covering the build up to the war in Iraq, and I have used a corpus of one hundred and fifty articles from The Economist to verify whether my first intuition had any basis. My working hypothesis was the following: When The Economist spoke of war, it transformed it into something else, e.g. problem solving, surgery or crime fighting. Meanwhile, business, international relations, eradicating terrorism, eradicating poverty and even pacifism were all conceived in terms of warfare. This paper posits that the switch proceeds by evacuating the meaning of one concept while importing it into another concept, which can from then on be framed and structured by this imported metaphorical framework.