A War on War Metaphor

Previous studies show that public discourse and social media discourse around the Covid-19 pandemic heavily use war framing, despite the fact that its misuse and inaptness to elaborate all aspects of the pandemic were already noted. This paper analyses conceptual metaphors in the Croatian (social) media discourse on the pandemic, focusing on the war metaphor. Using a specialized corpus of manually chosen relevant texts in Croatian, compiled for this purpose, we investigate how frequent war framing is in the Croatian media compared to alternative figurative framings. In a qualitative analysis, we outline the conceptual and inferential structure of the Covid-19 pandemic concept and discuss the structure, function, and (in)aptness of the war metaphor in pandemic circumstances. Additionally, by detecting other source frames used in this discourse, we offer other, possibly more apt (or less resisted) framing options – or a so-called metaphor menu – designed specifically for the Croatian language based on corpus data. We show that the Covid-19 pandemic is predominantly framed as combat or war in Croatian media and social media. Even though a ‘war’ on the war metaphor has been declared both by the media and research community, we show that the use of certain other source frames (e.g. the religion frame) may be even more dangerous than the war framing. The paper also discusses the aptness and omnipresence of the war metaphor, as well as its inaptness to refer to all aspects of this pandemic, concluding that it is rarely the type of metaphor that is harmful or inappropriate – it is rather the effect of the context and how it is used.