Women are evils?

There is a popular formula that widely spreads in the Internet shows that women equal evil. The demonstration is that men think they have to spend a lot of time and money to make women happy, so women equal money plus time. There is another saying that time is money. Therefore, women equal money powered by two. What’s more, money is the root of all evils. That is, women equal evils even powered by two.

Although the formula is a joke made by some guys perhaps, it shows a lot of metaphors that we use in our daily communication. After reading Lakeoff’s “Metaphors we live by”, I found that metaphors are ubiquity. Like the reading mentioned, “a cognitive tool used by humans for thinking and perceiving”, people always use metaphors to show their feelings about what the kind of terms like and sometimes create new metaphors with their experience. I think the term “women are evils” reflects some men’s real thoughts about women.

But sometimes, we can’t use the metaphors in the reverse way. For example, we never say, “Money is time” or “Evils are women”. These two sentences cannot represent any fact or experience basis. Because we all know that if money is time, we can use money as time. Can we? The answer is time is not a good that can be exchanged. The time passed by, no one can catch it. The same as “evils are women”, there is no evil exist in our world. Evils are the term that people create to represent bad things. Thus, there is no gender distinction in evils.

Metaphors are an interesting tool to develop our languages. However, not all the metaphors can be correctly comprehended. In my opinion, metaphors should be used based on the similarity of two terms and on the facts.