Abstract

This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.

This paper deconstructs certain colloquial terms, objects and physical actions to reveal their importance in the cultural construction of landscape metaphor. Vernacular uses of language and displacement allow long-term inhabitants of Britain’s southwestern Cornish peninsula to assimilate environments and localities into a particular ontological framework of orientation. While exploring the directional nature of certain linguistic and embodied spatial idioms as elements of cultural identity, I consider direction of movement and location in both space/time. By guiding verbal, visual and visceral metaphors through Cornwall’s landscapes, residents intertwine a world view with a “word view”. This concerns the movements between locations figuratively fixed in local biographies, vernacular codes of difference and materialised space. The directionality of the body, toponyms and colloquialisms thus highlight a fluid form of distinction.

Keywords

landscape idioms, directionality, Cornish identity, metaphor

Publisher Notes

• This article was previously published by Museum Tusculanum Press.