Linguistic nacre

Is my shell-and-pearl metaphor improved by mapping nacre to language and the enveloping and pervading irritants to language-defiant realities?

Or is it better to map nacre to objectivity and the the nacre-necessitating irritants to whatever rejects objective comprehension?

Does this difference make a difference?

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“And our condition is linguistic: we say non-metaphorically first.” — Jan Zwicky

3 thoughts on “Linguistic nacre

  1. I’d map the nacre, not just to linguistic metaphors, but to all forms of “seeing-as”. For example, there are many examples of visual seeing-as’s. And of course, affordances are a paradigm of seeing as.

    I think where the analogy with nacre runs out for me is that the process of nacre-ing (sp?) changes that which becomes covered in nacre, but it doesn’t change the organism doing the nacre-ing. I see our see-ing as as a form of dependent co-arising/reciprocal constitution: we shape our world and our world shapes us.

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