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Metaphors We Live By
Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 book that overturned the view of metaphor as ornament and established it as a structural feature of thought — one of the most cited works in the cognitive sciences.
Metaphors We Live By is the 1980 book by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that founded conceptual metaphor theory and became one of the most influential works in the cognitive sciences. Through systematic analysis of ordinary English expressions, the book demonstrated that metaphor is not a decorative feature of language used to embellish thoughts that could be expressed literally, but a structural feature of cognition itself. Abstract domains — time, argument, love, ideas, emotions — are understood through systematic mappings from concrete, bodily experience. The mappings are not arbitrary; they carry entailments from source domain to target domain that structure reasoning whether the user is aware of them or not. The book's accessible prose and abundant examples made its radical thesis digestible to general readers while its systematic methodology made it a foundational text in academic cognitive linguistics.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's method is to catalog ordinary linguistic expressions that reveal underlying conceptual metaphors. The canonical example