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single, familiar metaphorical view is being elaborated. It is similarly missed by the
notion of “entailments” (see, e.g., [ 29 , pp. 384-389] of a metaphorical view.
I will be much concerned with the open-endedness of scenario elaboration. The
following illustration is a rich but mundane example of creativemetaphor using open-
ended elaboration, from a story in a romance magazine found on a supermarket shelf:
(1)
Sharon pulled herself out of her jeans, the words “How could he? How could he?”
jumping about her wearied brain. Senseless, leaving her empty, cold, helpless. Another
voice, angry and vindictive, shouted in her ear, 'Serves you right, you silly fool: play
with fire and watch your life go up in flames. It was all so predictable'. 4
This contains many metaphorical aspects, some of which take the form of conven-
tional metaphorical wording (play with fire, watch, life go up in flames, empty, cold).
“Conventional” metaphorical wording is frequently used, relatively fixed wording
with an entrenched metaphorical meaning. Also, portraying thoughts as if they were
spoken utterances is common, especially in written fiction, as evidenced for instance
by the ATT-Meta databank's section on the metaphorical view called Ideas As Inter-
nal Utterances However, it is very unusual to talk about someone's thought as an
utterance “jumping about” their brain. It is certainly very common for thoughts to
be portrayed as animate beings. 5 But a search of GloWbE (see footnote 3) found no
instances of anything jumping about a brain (or head, mind or skull) or jumping about
in/inside a brain, etc. A search of the web delivered some instances of thoughts jump-
ing about a brain. 6 But only two of those instances featured words jumping about
the brain, one with a “book” doing the jumping, another with “stories” doing the
jumping. No instances were found of a particular string of words jumping about a
brain.
Another example is:
(2) The weather is settling into a drier frame of mind. 7
It is conventional to talk of “settled” weather, and the “settling” in (2) is a minor
elaboration conveying the process of the weather becoming settled. But talk of the
weather being in a “drier frame of mind” is creative. It is unusual phraseology, and
at the same time a highly effective and economical way to convey a subtle state of
the weather. Note that (2) conveys not that the weather is necessarily going to be
in a (settled) state that is consistently drier, but rather a state in which it has some
tendency to be drier. This is just as when we say someone is in a “generous frame
of mind” to mean that they are currently inclined to be generous, not that they are
actually being consistently generous.
In (2) a (frame of) mind is being attributed to the weather, which is therefore
being personified. Weather has historically often been personified (or deified), so that
4 From magazine My Story , May 1995, p. 17. Gibraltar: Editions Press Ltd.
5 Again see ATT-Meta databank, section on Ideas As Persons or Other Animate Beings .
6 Eight instances on screen pages shown by Google searches conducted on 24th March 2014, using
the search pattern “jump about * brain” and variants with “jumps”, “jumping” and “jumped”.
7 From a weather report on BBC Radio 4, U.K., 7 a.m., 30 July 2003.
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