“Britain was already cherry-picking from the European tree without bothering to water the soil or tend to its
branches”
A metaphorical study of the UK in Europe
Starting from the ambivalent discursive constructions of belongings and attachments, this paper is a description
of the uneasy and uncomfortable relation between the UK and the ‘continent’. It discusses the historical British insular attitude
looking at the metaphorical language used around Brexit, with a special emphasis on the metaphor “have one’s cake and eat it”,
referring to the “cherry-picking” attitude that the British government wishes to have, retaining EU membership benefits without
its obligations. Boris Johnson admitted that his policy on cake was “pro having it and pro eating it”, expressing an argument
that, on withdrawing from the European Union, Britain would still retain many of the benefits that it had enjoyed as a member,
since Britain was already “cherry-picking from the European tree without bothering to water the soil or tend to its branches”.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.A brief historic overview
- 3.“We are leaving the European Union but we are not leaving Europe”
- 4.Cake and cherry in the spoken corpus
- 4.1Cake in the spoken corpus
- 4.2Cherry in the spoken corpus
- 5.Cake and cherry in the written corpus: A buffet-style transition
- 6.Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
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References