288 Chapter Thirteen
Ahmadinejad makes use of ‘peas and beans’ to indicate the ridiculousness
of the arguments made by supporters of family planning. Peas and beans
are assumed to be abundant and easy to provide, which are utilized to
show that family planning supporters naively think that once fertility rate
reached a worrying level, solutions could be at hand. On the contrary,
Ahmadinejad proposes that low fertility rate necessarily leads to
generation extinction as he has asserted it in his remarks (see example 11)
and the loss could in no way be compensated. The metaphorical analogy in
the last part of his remark, based on the LIFE IS JOURNEY and POPULATION
IS A PERSON metaphors, points to functions of people and their level of
contribution to society relative to their age, which implies that the youth
are the most efficient and senior citizens inefficient and dysfunctional
since they only consume economic resources and are not part of the work
force needed to execute development plans. However, he does not
conspicuously refer to efficiency or inefficiency of individuals during their
lifetime and only does this metonymically through which age stands for
individuals’ level of capability or efficiency, a realization of the PART FOR
PART conceptual metonymy.
Procreation promotion in verbo-pictorial billboards
Roadside billboards provide an ideal place to advertise novel sets of social
prescriptions. Billboards designed to promote families to procreate
overwhelmingly illustrate culturally-religiously embedded concepts and
frames. In addition, Instead of using real pictures of families, the designers
have chosen to depict characters in a cartoon-style fashion to ameliorate
the socially undesirable nature of having many children and project such
features as affection, warmth and happiness onto the target meaning. This
way, the communicators might ensure that the message they intend to
convey would not evoke the salient negative properties that are associated
with large families and constant pregnancies.
Figure 1 shows a family of six on a tandem bicycle, a young father and
his five children. They are happily peddling under a blue sky in spring,
going on a picnic. The statement written on the top of the picture reads:
‘One Flower Does Not Make A Spring; More Children, A Happier Life.’
The first part of the slogan is a Persian proverb which means that the ideal
result is not achieved with only one contributing element. The ideal result
here is reaching happiness which necessitates having more children.
Likewise, to have spring, more than one flower is needed. Flowers as
prototypical elements of the SPRING domain correspond to all contributing
elements involved in reaching the ideal result (happiness) in the CHILDREN