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>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, [...] No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human lin
by jasode 7y ago
>Can we stop comparing business to war? In war, [...]
No, we can't because talking about any topic with war metaphors seems to be deeply ingrained in human linguistics.
In games like football, we talk about the the quarterback being the "field general" and the offensive tackles and defensive tackles "battling in the trenches".
When husbands & wives argue or fight in divorce cases, we talk about them "drawing their battle lines".
Historians or politicians often talk of "class warfare" or "war on poverty". The "Occupy Wall Street" protest is another borrowing of words from war.
Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer".
Wikipedia's most controversial articles have "edit wars" which results in pages getting locked.
In computer science, we have the "Byzantine Generals Problem" which is war metaphor.
If you want to jump into every thread <topic X> to plead with people to "stop comparing X to war", you're not going to get anywhere. (E.g. "can we please stop comparing distributed computing fault detection to Byzantium generals and war?")
Even the linguistics field which studied our propensity to always compare topics to "war" also went meta on itself with "linguistic wars": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics_wars
- the_af 7y ago> Biologists and doctors talk about "war against disease" and the "war on cancer". There was an article posted to HN some time ago (last year?) that argued we should stop saying people must "fight cancer" and similar terminal diseases, because it puts the patient in an unfair position: it's all about their "will to live" and their "struggle", and if they die, it can be seen as a failure on their part. While (I think) there is a mental factor to fighting terminal diseases, the article argues cancer will often kill you regardless of how much you "fight", so it's unfair to put it in those terms.
- mnowicki 7y agoGood point, I'd also like to add that just because an analogy doesn't apply 100% when you try to push it as far as you can, doesn't mean it's not a useful analogy. If you could push an analogy all the way and still have it apply 100%, then it wouldn't be an analogy, it would just be the thing.
- jbattle 7y ago> ingrained in human linguistics Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture?
- jasode 7y ago>Or maybe more accurately it's deeply ingrained in Anglo-American culture? I don't know about all languages but French, German, and Chinese all have military and war metaphors that are commonly used in everyday speech. It's not unique to American English.