2025 updates – £0.77 book & new article on metaphor

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Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing – now £0.77 ($0.99) for Kindle version

For a limited period — the Kindle edition of my 200+ page 2023 book on political framing and media metaphor is available now for £0.77, or $0.99. (Paperback £8.99). I’d boast that the first three chapters give the fastest route to an “aha!” moment on conceptual metaphor available “anywhere”.

Buy book: UK Amazon – Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing (Kindle)

USA: US Amazon – Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing (Kindle)

(Check your local Amazon for other countries).

Some more (new) background on the book below…

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New article on metaphors of physics

At my other, slightly more up-to-date, blog, RAW semantics (on the work of Robert Anton Wilson), I’ve posted a new article about Dr Roger Jones’s book, Physics as Metaphor. Readers of George Lakoff’s work on conceptual metaphor should find this relevant and hopefully interesting. The foundational concepts of physical science – space, time, matter and number (ie measure) – arose metaphorically. That’s Dr Jones’s argument, also reflected in Wilson’s work, and Lakoff’s. Here’s Prof. Lakoff commenting on metaphor in science:

‘Metaphors for the mind, as you say, have evolved over time — from machines to switchboards to computers. There’s no avoiding metaphor in science. In our lab, we use the Neural Circuitry metaphor ubiquitous throughout neuroscience. If you’re studying neural computation, that metaphor is necessary. In the day to day research on the details of neural computation, the biological brain moves into the background while the Neural Circuitry introduced by the metaphor is what one works with. But no matter how ubiquitous a metaphor may be, it is important to keep track of what it hides and what it introduces. If you don’t, the body does disappear. We’re careful about our metaphors, as most scientists should be.’ – Conversation with Lakoff in Edge

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Some (new) background on the £0.77 non-blockbuster

The original idea for my book came from a response (from a couple of well-known people) to News Frames, which started in 2011, fourteen years ago! I had disliked most mass UK media for a long time – particularly the high-circulation conservative rags whose object seemed primarily anger (or fear) inducement, dumb-down distraction, resentment management and blame redirection (we’ve seen the results of that in Brexit and the growth of far right politics in the UK, more recently accelerated and intensified by social media). I also didn’t take to the approaches of some “independent” online media critics who were becoming increasingly vocal at the time.

But I very much took to the insights on media framing in George Lakoff’s 2004 book, Don’t Think of an Elephant. I also loved his thesis on Moral Politics and, more generally, his pioneering cognitive linguistics work – on conceptual metaphor and frames, increasingly turning to new research in neuroscience (see Lakoff quote, above).

Lakoff’s political work focused on America – eg on the rise of the “radical right” and the different worldviews of Democrats and Republicans. I wondered if I could apply the same kind of framing analyses to news stories as they arose in the UK press. I couldn’t see anyone else doing this. A typical example of what I produced was this 2011 post, commenting on a Daily Express headline, ‘4M SCROUNGING FAMILIES IN BRITAIN’. (Incidentally, the “war on scroungers” seems alive and frothing – not just in the UK, but also in Trump’s America, notably in the political ideologies of some over-influential billionaire Silicon Valley “libertarians”).

A few of my News Frames pieces “went viral”, reposted on social media by George Monbiot, Frankie Boyle and a few other media figures. (Monbiot later linked, in a Guardian article, to a succinct “primer” I’d written on framing, and this ended up quite widely read and well-received). That led me to write a short “eBook”, essentially an extension of the material in the blog – published in 2014.

My later expanded, updated (much rewritten) 2023 paperback version, Lazy Person’s Guide to Framing (now available for £0.77 or $0.99), then brought these topics into the post-Brexit, post-Trump age, in a more coherent form, including primers on framing and conceptual metaphor, chapters on moral politics and short, punchy framing analyses of several UK media stories. (I look at tabloid stereotypes, briefly visiting prototype theory and ‘salient exemplars‘, ‘misleading vividness‘, ‘churnalism‘, etc, and devote chapters to economics framing, war framing, “Orwellian language” and anxiety-inducing frames). The book also includes a few sections on the social media era, eg briefly analysing how influencers such as Steve Bannon repurposed old ‘left’ tropes for the radical rightwing. (This pre-dates Naomi Klein’s book, Doppelganger, which also looks at this).

I’ve used the words short, succinct, brief, punchy in my descriptions – because it’s that kind of book: a lazy critter’s guide (aka beginner’s or idiot’s guide – except I don’t generalise lazy folk as idiots or beginners).

I re-read the whole book recently, and felt pleasantly surprised. Nobody seems a bigger critic of my output than myself – and re-reading anything I’ve written more than a few months ago typically involves a lot of cringing and cursing on my part! But occasionally I impress myself, in modest ways.

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Some optional on-the-fly verbosity…

A.I. knows nothing of the weight of books

Books have long been one of my main “vices”. I remember the delight – pre-internet days, living and working in Kent – when I’d travel to London at weekends to visit bookshops dotting the Charing Cross and Leicester Square areas. Foyles, Forbidden Planet, Watkins, and others. I’d return with bags full of paperbacks, a few zines/magazines, the odd hardback and VHS film – many of them imports and hard to find in provincial UK at the time. An expensive “pastime” (hence “vice”), but back then I had an okay-paid IT job, and I didn’t spend much on home, car, fancy gear, etc.

I’ve read a ton of books, and in my last move had to get rid of half of them, for lack of space (I ended up unloading them on charity shops/organisations – I didn’t have time to sell them, because of the move). I don’t consider myself the least bit “scholarly”, and although one picks up knowledge, that mostly doesn’t seem the object of reading for me. Rather, the sheer pleasure mixed with curiosity and a sort of “questing” sense of mystery and adventure drives my book habit. The exploration of unorthodox worlds, very different perspectives, new semantic slants and immersions, genius uplifting insights and useful psychological formulations, emotions and atmospheres, enlivening and/or transcendent philosophies, weird stories, worldly wisdom, poetic shifts – relaxation, relief and escape, the contented dissolution of the limits of habitual self. One tends not to get these things from social media, or from a notifications (distraction) screen smaller than your hand!* I would tell people (if I were in the habit of telling people things, which thankfully I’m mostly not) that if they don’t experience these book-derived wonders, it simply means they haven’t yet found the “right” reading for themselves. Follow your intuitive bliss in matters of books. Whatever your kink, there will be books to service it!

* I make an exception for Kindle (and equivalent) dedicated book-readers – as slightly larger light-on (as opposed to light-through) screens, non-notification (mostly offline) devices. I find they provide a focused, undistracted reading experience. And they save a lot of money (and space) compared to physical books. I view the Kindle’s screen as easy on the eyes (one soon forgets its physical presence when reading) – very different from phone and computer screens. The ability to adjust default text size and spacing also reduces eye strain.

The more you read books, the less you (may) feel you know. That seems sort of obvious, and also wonderful. The more you watch Youtube/TikTok influencers and “explainers”, the more you (might) feel you know it all. (Some influential people apparently do, judging from their routinely very, very sweeping generalisations and, er, panchrestons). That seems both ironic and terrible to me.

What books am I reading? I recently made the effort to list some – twice (once after being asked, and once to join in a list-type online blog discussion). Since no further effort is required on my part, I’ll “share” the second list here – with the aim of generally promoting books. (I don’t rate them all, and I particularly don’t recommend the Peter Thiel book – I read it for insights into the thought processes of a basically fascist jizzillionaire crank with far too much influence on US, and increasingly UK, infrastructure and politics). I tend to have several tomes on the go at once, which I dip into and read over a long period:

Invisible Rulers – Renee DiResta
More Everything Forever – Adam Becker
Live Flesh – Ruth Rendell
The New Inquisition – Robert Anton Wilson (nth re-read)
The Dose Effect – TJ Power
Firepower – John Cutter (John Shirley)
Silicon Embrace – John Shirley
Owned – Eoin Higgins
Reading Emptiness – Jeff Humphries
Dark Money – Jane Mayer
Tampa – Alissa Nutting
Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right – Quinn Slobodian
Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism – George Monbiot
The Trouble with Sunbathers – Magnus Mills
Idoru – William Gibson (re-read)
Reverse Meditation – Andrew Holecek
The Brothers Karamazov – Dostoevsky (first time read, I read Crime and Punishment yonks ago)
The Linguistics Wars (new edition with Lakoff in subtitle) – Randy Allen Harris
Transparent Body, Luminous World – Rupert Spira
Know Yourself – Ibn ‘Arabi / Balyani
The Proof of My Innocence – Jonathan Coe
Metaphysics – Aristotle
Pain Free: A Revolutionary Method for Stopping Chronic Pain – Pete Egoscue
Zero to One – Peter Thiel
Abroad in Japan – Chris Broad
Mastering Bitcoin – Andreas Antonopoulos
Nexus – Yuval Noah Harari