Metaphors We Trade By: The Natural in the Financial Rhetoric of the Sage of Omaha

• In Event: The Rhetorical Analysis of Corporate Speakers: Three Approaches to Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders

Abstract

Rhetorical criticism has for some decades now challenged the common sense notion that metaphor is merely the ornament of thought. Rather it has searched for, in Lakoff and Johnson’s famous phrase, the “metaphors we live by” (1980). Lakoff and Johnson, as well as numerous others, have documented the pervasiveness of business metaphors in and out of commercial life. Those metaphors abound in Buffett’s letters and do predictable sorts of work. But this analysis reveals that it is clusters of metaphors drawn from a very different domain, metaphors from the natural world, with which Buffett not only carries forward his argument but also fashions and maintains his ethos over the three decades. It is perhaps in this way that Buffett in part cemented his public identity as “the sage of Omaha.”

Author

• David Russell, Iowa State University