Dec
28th
Wed
28th
“Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typieully viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”
— George Lakoff, American cognitive linguist and professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mark Johnson, Metaphors we live by, University Of Chicago Press, 2003.
