Weaponization: Ubiquity and Metaphorical Meaningfulness

ABSTRACT

Conceptual metaphor theory implies that ubiquitous metaphors become mere descriptions or concepts if they are not embedded in competing discursive communities. This paper demonstrates that weaponiz- retained its meaningfulness after becoming ubiquitous despite being used by all sides in contemporary contentious politics. Because metaphors derive their figurativeness through tension, weaponiz- shows that temporality, or social time, can be marshaled to contrast an unpleasant “now” with a better “past.” This metaphoricity stands in contrast to the word’s conceptual origins in the Cold War defense industry as a literal description of the logistical deployment of weapons systems. As the word’s use mutated into a metaphor around 2003, it took on its contemporary moral meaning of over-politicizing things that had been, and should remain, neutral or peaceful. By 2017 “the weaponization of everything” implied that all aspects of social life were newly embroiled in illegitimate politics, making the metaphor a profound act of nostalgia that erased even recent conflicts. This paper thus adds temporal rhetorical tension as one of the ways that metaphors can retain meaningfulness through a case study of a metaphor that arose only recently, demonstrating the usefulness of diachronic analyses of novel metaphor emergence.

Acknowledgments

I thank Lisa Stampnitzky and Paul Thibodeau for their helpful suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

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² Searches were conducted for “weaponization of *”, “* was weaponized”, “ * were weaponized”, “weaponize a *”, “weaponize *” where * = plane-, aircraft, jet-, air-, commercial, passenger. It appeared twice in the Nexis Uni News corpus: in industry newsletter, Air Safety Week’s (2001) piece about anti-hijacking measures that would make aircraft “de-weaponized” (scare quotes in original), and an editorial by Marleen S. Barr about the development of missile shields “well before weaponized planes fell from the sky,” which appeared in four regional newspapers in the San Francisco Bay Area (the Alameda Times-Star, the Tri-Valley Herald, the East Bay Times, and the San Jose Mercury News) and also in the Nassau and Suffolk Counties Edition of Newsday (e.g. Barr, 2001).