Foreseeable Future Events Are Up (and Ahead)
metaphor
Source: Embodied Experience → Time and Temporality
Categories: cognitive-sciencelinguistics
From: Metaphors We Live By
Transfers
Events that are approaching in time are described as “coming up.” Things that are imminent are “up ahead.” This orientational metaphor maps temporal proximity — specifically, the near future that one can anticipate — onto upward (and sometimes forward) spatial orientation. The grounding is less directly postural than HAPPY IS UP or HEALTH IS UP; it draws instead on the way scheduled events seem to rise into view, the way items climb a queue or calendar as their time approaches.
Key structural parallels:
- Approaching events as rising — “What’s coming up this week?” “The deadline is coming up.” “Her birthday is coming up soon.” Future events that are drawing near are described as moving upward, as though they are rising from below the horizon of awareness into visibility.
- Immediacy as proximity to the top — “Next up is the quarterly review.” “That topic is up next.” “You’re up.” The nearest future event is at the top of a vertical queue. The metaphor borrows from the physical experience of things rising to the surface or to the top of a stack.
- Scheduling as vertical arrangement — “Move that meeting up.” “We pushed the launch up to Tuesday.” “Let’s bump it up.” Rescheduling an event to an earlier time is described as moving it upward. The calendar becomes a vertical surface where sooner is higher.
- Past events as settled down — by contrast, completed events have “come and gone,” “passed,” or are “behind us.” They have left the elevated, visible zone of the near future and settled into the lower territory of the past. The metaphor gives time a vertical gradient: approaching = rising, receding = sinking.
The metaphor works in concert with the more common TIME IS MOTION metaphors (time as a river, the future as something ahead), but adds a specifically vertical component. Events do not just approach along a horizontal path — they rise.
Limits
- The distant future is not “down” — while approaching events are “up,” far-future events are not consistently described as “down.” They are “far off,” “a long way away,” “distant” — using horizontal, not vertical, language. The metaphor only activates for the foreseeable future, creating an asymmetry: up has a temporal meaning, but down does not serve as its temporal inverse.
- The metaphor conflicts with other temporal orientations — in TIME IS A MOVING LANDSCAPE, the future is ahead and the past is behind (horizontal). In some East Asian languages, the future is below and the past is above. FORESEEABLE FUTURE IS UP sits uneasily alongside these other mappings, and speakers switch between them without noticing the inconsistency.
- “Coming up” conflates temporal and attentional proximity — when someone says “coming up on the news,” they mean “next in the broadcast sequence,” not necessarily “soon in clock time.” The metaphor blurs the distinction between temporal nearness and attentional salience. Something can be “coming up” because it is next in a queue, not because it is temporally imminent.
- Urgency is not always vertical — the metaphor gives no way to distinguish between an event that is approaching quickly (a deadline rushing toward you) and one that is simply next in a static sequence (the next item on the agenda). Both are “up,” but they involve very different temporal relationships.
- Rescheduling language is ambiguous — “move the meeting up” can mean either “make it sooner” or “make it later,” depending on the speaker’s mental model. This ambiguity reveals the metaphor’s instability: the vertical axis does not map consistently onto the temporal axis across all speakers.
Expressions
- “What’s coming up this week?” — imminent events as rising into view
- “The deadline is coming up” — approaching due date as upward movement
- “Next up is the quarterly review” — next event as top of a vertical queue
- “You’re up” — it is your turn, you have risen to the active position
- “Move that meeting up” — reschedule to sooner as shift upward
- “We bumped up the launch date” — earlier scheduling as raising
- “That issue came up at the meeting” — a topic rising into discussion
- “Something has come up” — an unexpected event rising into the near future
- “Up and coming” — an emerging person or trend approaching visibility
- “The holidays are coming up” — seasonal events rising into temporal proximity
Origin Story
Lakoff and Johnson mention this metaphor briefly in Chapter 4 of Metaphors We Live By as part of their catalog of orientational metaphors. It is one of the less extensively discussed entries — they note the example “All upcoming events are listed in the paper” and observe that foreseeable future events are conceptualized as UP. The metaphor is less physically grounded than HAPPY IS UP or HEALTH IS UP; Lakoff and Johnson suggest its basis lies in the way we scan the horizon (looking up and ahead) to perceive what is approaching.
The metaphor interacts with the broader system of temporal metaphors in interesting ways. It adds a vertical dimension to what is usually treated as a horizontal or sagittal mapping (future = ahead, past = behind), suggesting that the cognitive system for time is not a single consistent spatial metaphor but a layered set of partially overlapping orientational mappings.
References
- Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. Metaphors We Live By (1980), Chapter 4
- Lakoff, G., Espenson, J. & Schwartz, A. Master Metaphor List (1991)
- Boroditsky, L. “Metaphoric Structuring: Understanding Time through Spatial Metaphors” in Cognition (2000)
Related Entries
- Happy Is Up; Sad Is Down
- More Is Up; Less Is Down
- Having Control Is Up; Being Subject To Control Is Down
Structural Neighbors
Entries from different domains that share structural shape. Computed from embodied patterns and relation types, not text similarity.
- Let Justice Be Done Though the Heavens Fall (/paradigm)
- Risk a Lot to Save a Lot (/mental-model)
- Silence Gives Consent (/paradigm)
- Amara's Law (perception-and-cognition/mental-model)
- Logical Relations Are Causal Relations (causal-reasoning/metaphor)
- Linear Scales Are Paths (journeys/metaphor)
- Long-Term Purposeful Activity Is a Journey (journeys/metaphor)
- Long-Term Purposeful Change Is a Journey (journeys/metaphor)
Structural Tags
Patterns: pathnear-farscale
Relations: causetransform
Structure: hierarchy Level: primitive
Contributors: agent:metaphorex-miner, fshot