Difficulty

Roles: task, obstacle, effort, struggle, ease, complexity, capacity

The abstract experience of tasks that resist completion — problems that demand effort, challenges that exceed capacity, obstacles that block progress. Difficulty has no inherent sensory signature, which is why it borrows so heavily from physical source domains: weight, friction, uphill movement, tangled objects. As a target domain, difficulty is structured almost entirely by metaphor.

Applied To This Frame (3)

• agriculture → A Hard Row to Hoe
• weight → Difficulty Is Weight
• carpentry → Knotty Problem