Once Upon A Time

behind us now. Let's put that in back of us now. We're looking ahead to the future. He has a great future in front of of him."

A Moving Time Metaphor: "There is a lone, stationary observer facing in a fixed direction. There is an indefinitely long sequence of objects moving past the observer from front to back. The moving objects are conceptualized as having fronts in their direction of motion."

Common linguistic expressions: "There's going to be trouble down the road. Will you be staying a long time or a short time. Let's spread the conference over two weeks. We passed the deadline. I'll be there in a minute."

A Moving Observer Metaphor: "What we will encounter in the future is what we are moving towards. What we are encountering now is what we are moving by. What we encounter in the past is what we moved past."

We see in these time metaphors a duality of figure and background reversals. In one metaphor time moves and the observer is stationary while in the other the observer moves and time is stationary. Such duality of figure-ground reversals is apparently common in human perception. "Object-location duality occurs for a simple reason: Many metaphorical mappings take a motion in space as a source domain. With motion in space, there is the possibility of reversing figure and ground."

The quotes are from "Philosophy in the Flesh".