When Did Everything Become A Journey?

The quest for better health is the greatest journey of all, writes Lisa Miller …

According to US-based linguistics professor Jesse Egbert, the use of “journey” has nearly doubled since 1990, with the most frequent instances occurring online. Mining a new database of conversational English he and colleagues are building, Egbert can show exactly how colloquial “journey” has become: One woman in Pennsylvania described her “journey to become a morning person,” while another in Massachusetts said she was “on a journey of trying to like fish.

In almost every language, “journey” has become a way to talk abstractly about outcomes, for good reason: According to what linguists call the “primary metaphor theory,” humans learn as babies crawling toward their toys that “‘purpose’ and ‘destination’ coincide,” says linguist Elena Semino, who specialises in metaphor. As we become able to accomplish our goals while sitting still, ambition and travel diverge. Yet we continue to envision achievement as a matter of forward progress.

“Journey” had fully entered medical-speak by the 2010s. Many cancer patients recoiled from the “battle” language traditionally used by doctors, as well as by friends and relatives. To reflexively call an experience of cancer a battle created “winners” and “losers,” where death or long suffering represented a failure – of will, strength, determination, diet, behavior or outlook – on the part of the patient. Many patients “detest” the military metaphor, Robert Miller conceded inin 2010.

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