Cognitive and historical concepts of the “career of metaphor”

Abstract The stigmatizing metaphor of human individuals or groups as “(social) parasites” is often treated as an example of semantic transfer from the biological to the social domain. Historically, however, the application of the English term “parasite” to social entities/ actors precedes the biological identification of parasitical organisms. Even after the popularization of the concept of bio-parasites during the Enlightenment, the older figurative meaning was not fully superseded, so that in present-day use a continuum of variants is found. This chapter discusses methods of reconstructing the diachronic development of the parasite metaphor and argues in favour of an approach in which the cognitive idealizations of metaphors’ semantic “careers” are complemented — and partly corrected — by empirical evidence of socially situated metaphor use and comprehension.