These blog-like pages contain experiments and explications, the earliest composed in graduate school when I was first drafting and revising an early version of my book, Metaphors of Mind, An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary.

Originally published on a TextDrive blogging platform (which is no more), the posts were republished here on June 3, 2014. I archive the old short essays in this WordPress site, flog my book in new ones, and will be adding quantitative detail as I get better at coding in R.

Treated in the posts are select metaphors of mind from British eighteenth-century literature. The complete collection of metaphors—over 14,000 metaphors—is taxonomized here.

You are rummaging in a cabinet of curiosities. As I worked first on my dissertation and then my book, I would fish out peculiar and interesting metaphors from The Mind is a Metaphor database, display, and discuss them in these nonce blog-like essays. Most of this writing didn’t fit in my manuscript, and so it was published online.

I/Brad am the Explicator. I am (now) an Associate Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

It is my hope that these pages will attract attention to the dictionary of metaphors I’ve written—published by The Johns Hopkins University Press—and to the database that houses the evidence used in the composition of the dictionary.