The Tabloid Terrorist in the Metaphorical Making.

It is hardly novel to argue that terrorism is a metaphorical construction. Only five days after 9/11, George Lakoff published a short piece on “Metaphors of Terror” in which he shows that the US-administration at first framed the events as a “crime”, but changed to “war” within hours. Surprisingly, not much research on the metaphorical construction of terrorism has followed since, despite continued terrorist attacks. We will show in our paper that this is a serious failure, as metaphorical analysis allows us to understand not only how we came to understand terrorism in a certain way, but also why we reacted the way we did. As metaphors construct the phenomenon in a specific way, they make certain counter-terrorism policies possible while other means of addressing the issue remain outside of the options considered as a response. To support our claim we present empirical evidence from a comparative study on terrorism-metaphors and their policy-implications in Germany and the UK. Arguing that popular images are at least as important as expert images we have focused on terrorism-metaphors in the tabloid press (‘Sun’ and ‘Bild’). However, we not only compare popular metaphor-use in these two countries, but also examine the way they have evolved over time: while there is little difference between the metaphors in Germany and the UK, they have changed remarkably from 9/11 to Madrid (2004) and London (2005). ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]