Metaphor is a lot more than you think it is.
Metaphor is how meaning works.
And approaching metaphor the way cognitive linguistics does can be transformative for how you think about verbal communication.
In what follows, I’ll show you that we can learn to see metaphor not as a superficial, decorative literary device but a fundamental part of human cognition. We can recognize that the concepts we use to organize the world are almost all built off of other concepts. And with this knowledge, we can take the reins of metaphor — we can use it to help understand and integrate new information, make our human experience coherent, and direct future action.
Most of Language is Under the Hood
Linguistics, as an academic discipline, is largely about looking at language and figuring out what’s actually going on that you’re not seeing. It’s about understanding a kind of magic.
There is so, so, so much going on to make language work, both in our individual minds and the collective mind we call culture. Overlapping systems of form and structure and meaning and function. And it mostly has to happen instantaneously and subconsciously, at a level below our awareness.
If language didn’t work largely on implicit patterns, if we had to spell everything out in real time, it would take for-fucking-ever.
Like that, let’s look at that one — if you’re a native English speaker, no one had to tell you that if you want to place “fucking” inside “forever”, you make the cut and insert it between “for” and “ever”. No one has ever said it as “for-e-fucking-ver”. And where do you put the “fucking” in the word “emblematic”? There’s only one right answer, and even though you’ve probably never heard or read or said it, you just know the right answer is “emble-fucking-matic”.
That’s because it’s rule-bound. There’s a system. There’s a well-established structural pattern, and a set of implicit conventions around fucking-insertion (yes, that’s a technical term). And even though you were never “taught” it, even though you might not be able to “articulate” why it works the way it does, you do, in fact, know those rules, how the system works.
Most of what language actually is isn't in the sounds coming out of your mouth, or the shape of your hands when you sign, or the written words on a page — most of language is under the hood.
What’s Really Being Said
I had to start out by getting you to believe me when I say that most of what you “know” about the language you speak is implicit knowledge and not explicit knowledge. And that’s because otherwise you might not believe me when I tell you the lead point here — most of the things you say are, to some degree or another, metaphorical language.
Here’s some metaphorical language I read in the news & editorials this week:
- “The simple delineation between truth and lies has all but evaporated in recent years”
- “Mr. Macron has drily pronounced his task to be of 'Himalayan' proportions”
- “A bejewelled and honey-basted fruit cake"
These are all deliberate metaphors — we know that “truth” can’t literally “evaporate”, that the French president’s job has nothing to do literally with the Himalayas, and that a fruit cake should not contain literal gemstones. These are metaphors we all know are metaphors.
But here’s some other examples of metaphors from the news & editorials I read this week:
- “Reducing public anxiety is a delicate task for the White House”
- “The chronic eczema I have always suffered from flared up”
- “These status symbols brought much prestige and pleasure to those who could afford them"
You might wonder where the metaphor is in some of these examples.
In fact, I might sound like a poor speaker of English or an obnoxious contrarian if I say that public anxiety can’t literally be reduced, eczema can’t literally flare up, and pleasure can’t literally be brought to you. But… that’s the truth.
Public anxiety doesn’t actually have physical size, eczema is not actually fire, and pleasure is not a physical object that could be “brought”.
These are all examples of conventional metaphors — metaphorical language used as a basic and normal way people understand a given concept. Through conventionalization, these metaphors feel like literal language. But fundamentally, they are metaphors. They allow you to understand one thing by using the terms of another.
We give “anxiety” a shape and size so we can make it smaller. We make eczema into fire to talk about it burning. We think about pleasure as an object so that it can be given and received.
And importantly, this kind of metaphor is not merely a matter of words. “Eczema as fire” is a metaphor with entailments — it can burn, it can flare up, it can be cooled down, and it can be fueled. If “pleasure is an object”, it can be given and taken away, it can be lost and found, or it can be doubled and halved.
The entailments of a conceptual metaphor give us a whole suite of terms and ideas we can use to talk about one concept in the terms of another – thus, the words express the metaphor, but the metaphor is not the words.
When you start looking for this kind of metaphor – not the poetic kind, but the conceptual and conventional kind – you will really start seeing it in everything.
The Core of the Theory
This particular view of metaphor — that metaphor happens anytime you understand one concept in terms of another, and that it makes up the bulk of language — comes from what is usually called Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CTM). The theory was first brought to prominence by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 classic Metaphors We Live By I’d strongly recommend it to anyone whose job involves making decisions about the right words to use.
The primary contribution of CTM was to provide this reframe of what metaphor is. Metaphor has conventionally been thought of as a poetic or rhetorical device, something mutually exclusive with “literal” language. But Lakoff and Johnson laid out a comprehensive argument that the structure of poetic metaphors — understanding one thing in the terms of another — was not limited to figurative or poetic language. Rather, understanding one thing in the terms of another is a fundamental part of “literal” language as well, and of cognition more generally.
The metaphors most important to CTM are the ones that are structured, systematic, and conventionalized. Metaphors with lots of entailments.
A great example that Lakoff and Johnson used a lot was the metaphor TIME is MONEY.
We have an aphoristic expression “time is money”, and we recognize it as figurative, nonliteral language. But TIME is MONEY is a conceptual metaphor that we often use to express and understand what time is in the first place.
When we say “don’t waste my time”, that doesn’t make sense unless we are structuring TIME in the terms of a material resource that could fail to go to productive use. And that conceptualization makes up the bulk of how we talk about time – we spend time, we can give and take it, things cost you time, time can be invested, and so on and so forth.
Basics and Primes
If you’re following along and want to engage in your own experiential investigation of metaphor, looking for and finding it in the wild, I must warn you first – you may temporarily (or permanently) find yourself in a bout of metaphor madness. This is the self-induced para-schizoid state where you start to realize that everything you say is based on a conceptual metaphor, and you are left wondering if anything really means anything at all.
This is, in fact, a kind of question that linguists, semanticists, and semiologists have been thinking about for decades – mystics, theologians, and philosophers for much longer. If we take a view that most conceptual domains are metaphorically structured on other domains — like saying TIME is MONEY — we have to ask if there are concepts that are NOT metaphorically structured from other domains.
Lakoff and Johnson, the founders of CTM, generally rejected the idea of innate semantic units — their idea was that all meaning was built from the ground up on the basis of sensory input. There is, in fact, a whole subset of research on embodied conceptual metaphor and embodied cognitive linguistics which seeks to understand how meaning is bootstrapped out of nothing more than the external and internal sensory anatomy of the body.
In this body-centric view of meaning, Lakoff and Johnson did believe that relative and egocentric spatial concepts were very basic, like UP-DOWN, FRONT-BACK, IN-OUT, NEAR-FAR, NARROW-WIDE, BIG-SMALL. These concepts are core because of the fundamental human necessity to reason your own location in space. Another fundamental one for Lakoff and Johnson was the set OBJECT, SUBSTANCE, CONTAINER – this set is key and I challenge you to always look for CONTAINER/SUBSTANCE metaphors in your own writing.
Compare these concepts to something else people often think of as basic — emotions. What is ANGER, exactly? Etymologically, the word arises from a spatial concept — it originally meant something like NARROW, related to the concept of TIGHT, as you might see in other related words like anxious, anxiety, angst, or anguish (consider the expressions “he’s all wound up”, “she’s like a pressure-cooker”, or “you gotta loosen up”). This surely corresponds to the sense that all of these emotional states involve muscle tightness and vasoconstriction (blood vessels tighten and raise blood pressure). So, in our own linguistic history, the concept of ANGER was built off of more physical concepts related to the feelings of tension and pressure in the body.
ANGER is then also conceptualized as a SUBSTANCE inside the human body as CONTAINER. Think “boiling over with rage”, “exploding with anger”, “reaching your limit”. And importantly, we conventionally think about the SUBSTANCE of ANGER as rising UP in our bodies towards the head.
A great many concepts we use to make sense of ourselves and the world – like ANGER – are given structure with spatial, object, substance, and container metaphors where no such meanings are really literally present.
Applying Metaphor Theory to Verbal Creative
Personally, I think just learning to recognize how metaphor structures much of meaning will change the way you look at writing, and changing the way you look at writing will change… well, what you write.
But it can be helpful to spell things out a bit, so I’ll leave you with some ideas for how to apply this broader and more fundamental view of metaphor in your own writing and verbal work.
- New Skin, Old Frame: Balance novelty and familiarity by finding new ways to express major conventional metaphors. Example: If ANGER is a fluid substance in a container, find new substance-container relations to express the idea — a cheeseburger says to his frustrated friend, “don’t pop a ketchup packet”. By understanding deeper conceptual structures, you can provide new wrapping for well-established conventional metaphors, presenting new ideas that are more likely to track with audiences.
- Rebuild Foundations: Identify core conceptual metaphors at the heart of a brand/product/domain, and go against them to create distinction. Example: If you are writing copy for a money-sending app but it runs on a crypto blockchain, can you break out of the spatial metaphors of SENDING and RECEIVING physical goods? Maybe instead of friends “sending” you money, your account is a garden and your friends are helping you GROW your numbers. What entailments would come from restructuring the foundational metaphors used to describe a product?
- Reframing “Emotive” Language: Especially in an embodied conceptual metaphor framework, most ideas, even very abstract ones, are structured as composites of embodied concepts — sensory and interoceptive experiences, spatial reckoning, and self-to-other relationships. So, in all the talk of using more expressive, emotive language in brand copy, don’t think about “what words express strong emotions”, but rather the emotional and experiential underpinnings of all of the rest of language, and how you can exploit that.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Folks who work with words for a living are always on the hunt for new means of expression. A new turn of phrase, the puzzle piece vocab item that fits just where you need it. But it can often feel pretty forest-for-the-trees as a creative exercise.
Instead, a central takeaway from metaphor theory should really be that words are a layer sitting above the layer of concept and metaphor– and digging down to operate at the lower level will move you forward quicker than if you stay stuck at the surface.
John Elliott is a naming strategist and linguistics researcher based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Along with helping name brands, products, places, and campaigns, John writes regularly about linguistic approaches to verbal creativity and the art and science of meaning-making.
Metaphor is a lot more than you think it is.
Metaphor is how meaning works.
And approaching metaphor the way cognitive linguistics does can be transformative for how you think about verbal communication.
In what follows, I’ll show you that we can learn to see metaphor not as a superficial, decorative literary device but a fundamental part of human cognition. We can recognize that the concepts we use to organize the world are almost all built off of other concepts. And with this knowledge, we can take the reins of metaphor — we can use it to help understand and integrate new information, make our human experience coherent, and direct future action.
Most of Language is Under the Hood
Linguistics, as an academic discipline, is largely about looking at language and figuring out what’s actually going on that you’re not seeing. It’s about understanding a kind of magic.
There is so, so, so much going on to make language work, both in our individual minds and the collective mind we call culture. Overlapping systems of form and structure and meaning and function. And it mostly has to happen instantaneously and subconsciously, at a level below our awareness.
If language didn’t work largely on implicit patterns, if we had to spell everything out in real time, it would take for-fucking-ever.
Like that, let’s look at that one — if you’re a native English speaker, no one had to tell you that if you want to place “fucking” inside “forever”, you make the cut and insert it between “for” and “ever”. No one has ever said it as “for-e-fucking-ver”. And where do you put the “fucking” in the word “emblematic”? There’s only one right answer, and even though you’ve probably never heard or read or said it, you just know the right answer is “emble-fucking-matic”.
That’s because it’s rule-bound. There’s a system. There’s a well-established structural pattern, and a set of implicit conventions around fucking-insertion (yes, that’s a technical term). And even though you were never “taught” it, even though you might not be able to “articulate” why it works the way it does, you do, in fact, know those rules, how the system works.
Most of what language actually is isn't in the sounds coming out of your mouth, or the shape of your hands when you sign, or the written words on a page — most of language is under the hood.
What’s Really Being Said
I had to start out by getting you to believe me when I say that most of what you “know” about the language you speak is implicit knowledge and not explicit knowledge. And that’s because otherwise you might not believe me when I tell you the lead point here — most of the things you say are, to some degree or another, metaphorical language.
Here’s some metaphorical language I read in the news & editorials this week:
- “The simple delineation between truth and lies has all but evaporated in recent years”
- “Mr. Macron has drily pronounced his task to be of 'Himalayan' proportions”
- “A bejewelled and honey-basted fruit cake"
These are all deliberate metaphors — we know that “truth” can’t literally “evaporate”, that the French president’s job has nothing to do literally with the Himalayas, and that a fruit cake should not contain literal gemstones. These are metaphors we all know are metaphors.
But here’s some other examples of metaphors from the news & editorials I read this week:
- “Reducing public anxiety is a delicate task for the White House”
- “The chronic eczema I have always suffered from flared up”
- “These status symbols brought much prestige and pleasure to those who could afford them"
You might wonder where the metaphor is in some of these examples.
In fact, I might sound like a poor speaker of English or an obnoxious contrarian if I say that public anxiety can’t literally be reduced, eczema can’t literally flare up, and pleasure can’t literally be brought to you. But… that’s the truth.
Public anxiety doesn’t actually have physical size, eczema is not actually fire, and pleasure is not a physical object that could be “brought”.
These are all examples of conventional metaphors — metaphorical language used as a basic and normal way people understand a given concept. Through conventionalization, these metaphors feel like literal language. But fundamentally, they are metaphors. They allow you to understand one thing by using the terms of another.
We give “anxiety” a shape and size so we can make it smaller. We make eczema into fire to talk about it burning. We think about pleasure as an object so that it can be given and received.
And importantly, this kind of metaphor is not merely a matter of words. “Eczema as fire” is a metaphor with entailments — it can burn, it can flare up, it can be cooled down, and it can be fueled. If “pleasure is an object”, it can be given and taken away, it can be lost and found, or it can be doubled and halved.
The entailments of a conceptual metaphor give us a whole suite of terms and ideas we can use to talk about one concept in the terms of another – thus, the words express the metaphor, but the metaphor is not the words.
When you start looking for this kind of metaphor – not the poetic kind, but the conceptual and conventional kind – you will really start seeing it in everything.
The Core of the Theory
This particular view of metaphor — that metaphor happens anytime you understand one concept in terms of another, and that it makes up the bulk of language — comes from what is usually called Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CTM). The theory was first brought to prominence by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 classic Metaphors We Live By I’d strongly recommend it to anyone whose job involves making decisions about the right words to use.
The primary contribution of CTM was to provide this reframe of what metaphor is. Metaphor has conventionally been thought of as a poetic or rhetorical device, something mutually exclusive with “literal” language. But Lakoff and Johnson laid out a comprehensive argument that the structure of poetic metaphors — understanding one thing in the terms of another — was not limited to figurative or poetic language. Rather, understanding one thing in the terms of another is a fundamental part of “literal” language as well, and of cognition more generally.
The metaphors most important to CTM are the ones that are structured, systematic, and conventionalized. Metaphors with lots of entailments.
A great example that Lakoff and Johnson used a lot was the metaphor TIME is MONEY.
We have an aphoristic expression “time is money”, and we recognize it as figurative, nonliteral language. But TIME is MONEY is a conceptual metaphor that we often use to express and understand what time is in the first place.
When we say “don’t waste my time”, that doesn’t make sense unless we are structuring TIME in the terms of a material resource that could fail to go to productive use. And that conceptualization makes up the bulk of how we talk about time – we spend time, we can give and take it, things cost you time, time can be invested, and so on and so forth.
Basics and Primes
If you’re following along and want to engage in your own experiential investigation of metaphor, looking for and finding it in the wild, I must warn you first – you may temporarily (or permanently) find yourself in a bout of metaphor madness. This is the self-induced para-schizoid state where you start to realize that everything you say is based on a conceptual metaphor, and you are left wondering if anything really means anything at all.
This is, in fact, a kind of question that linguists, semanticists, and semiologists have been thinking about for decades – mystics, theologians, and philosophers for much longer. If we take a view that most conceptual domains are metaphorically structured on other domains — like saying TIME is MONEY — we have to ask if there are concepts that are NOT metaphorically structured from other domains.
Lakoff and Johnson, the founders of CTM, generally rejected the idea of innate semantic units — their idea was that all meaning was built from the ground up on the basis of sensory input. There is, in fact, a whole subset of research on embodied conceptual metaphor and embodied cognitive linguistics which seeks to understand how meaning is bootstrapped out of nothing more than the external and internal sensory anatomy of the body.
In this body-centric view of meaning, Lakoff and Johnson did believe that relative and egocentric spatial concepts were very basic, like UP-DOWN, FRONT-BACK, IN-OUT, NEAR-FAR, NARROW-WIDE, BIG-SMALL. These concepts are core because of the fundamental human necessity to reason your own location in space. Another fundamental one for Lakoff and Johnson was the set OBJECT, SUBSTANCE, CONTAINER – this set is key and I challenge you to always look for CONTAINER/SUBSTANCE metaphors in your own writing.
Compare these concepts to something else people often think of as basic — emotions. What is ANGER, exactly? Etymologically, the word arises from a spatial concept — it originally meant something like NARROW, related to the concept of TIGHT, as you might see in other related words like anxious, anxiety, angst, or anguish (consider the expressions “he’s all wound up”, “she’s like a pressure-cooker”, or “you gotta loosen up”). This surely corresponds to the sense that all of these emotional states involve muscle tightness and vasoconstriction (blood vessels tighten and raise blood pressure). So, in our own linguistic history, the concept of ANGER was built off of more physical concepts related to the feelings of tension and pressure in the body.
ANGER is then also conceptualized as a SUBSTANCE inside the human body as CONTAINER. Think “boiling over with rage”, “exploding with anger”, “reaching your limit”. And importantly, we conventionally think about the SUBSTANCE of ANGER as rising UP in our bodies towards the head.
A great many concepts we use to make sense of ourselves and the world – like ANGER – are given structure with spatial, object, substance, and container metaphors where no such meanings are really literally present.
Applying Metaphor Theory to Verbal Creative
Personally, I think just learning to recognize how metaphor structures much of meaning will change the way you look at writing, and changing the way you look at writing will change… well, what you write.
But it can be helpful to spell things out a bit, so I’ll leave you with some ideas for how to apply this broader and more fundamental view of metaphor in your own writing and verbal work.
- New Skin, Old Frame: Balance novelty and familiarity by finding new ways to express major conventional metaphors. Example: If ANGER is a fluid substance in a container, find new substance-container relations to express the idea — a cheeseburger says to his frustrated friend, “don’t pop a ketchup packet”. By understanding deeper conceptual structures, you can provide new wrapping for well-established conventional metaphors, presenting new ideas that are more likely to track with audiences.
- Rebuild Foundations: Identify core conceptual metaphors at the heart of a brand/product/domain, and go against them to create distinction. Example: If you are writing copy for a money-sending app but it runs on a crypto blockchain, can you break out of the spatial metaphors of SENDING and RECEIVING physical goods? Maybe instead of friends “sending” you money, your account is a garden and your friends are helping you GROW your numbers. What entailments would come from restructuring the foundational metaphors used to describe a product?
- Reframing “Emotive” Language: Especially in an embodied conceptual metaphor framework, most ideas, even very abstract ones, are structured as composites of embodied concepts — sensory and interoceptive experiences, spatial reckoning, and self-to-other relationships. So, in all the talk of using more expressive, emotive language in brand copy, don’t think about “what words express strong emotions”, but rather the emotional and experiential underpinnings of all of the rest of language, and how you can exploit that.
Conclusions and Takeaways
Folks who work with words for a living are always on the hunt for new means of expression. A new turn of phrase, the puzzle piece vocab item that fits just where you need it. But it can often feel pretty forest-for-the-trees as a creative exercise.
Instead, a central takeaway from metaphor theory should really be that words are a layer sitting above the layer of concept and metaphor– and digging down to operate at the lower level will move you forward quicker than if you stay stuck at the surface.
John Elliott is a naming strategist and linguistics researcher based in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. Along with helping name brands, products, places, and campaigns, John writes regularly about linguistic approaches to verbal creativity and the art and science of meaning-making.
