Idealog

L&J describe many other common metaphor structures such as Ideas Are Food (“that’s a really half-baked idea”), The Mind Is A Brittle Object (“I think he’s cracking up”), Emotional Effect Is Physical Force (“that blew me away”), Significant Is Big (“virtualisation is this year’s big idea”) and many more, all of which are immediately apparent when pointed out but completely unconscious when we use them. L&J also explain that metaphor isn’t just an ornament for decorating prose, but the fundamental mechanism for producing meaning and generating new ideas by combining older ones.

In a later book, Mark Johnson digs deeper beneath metaphor itself (an example of Profound Is Down) to uncover what he calls “image schemas”, non-verbal structures that capture the way the world works and which he postulates form part of our brain’s circuitry (in much the way it contains filters that recognise shape, colour and motion). A typical basic schema is Container, which covers all cases of how one thing can be inside another. To make truly intelligent computers, these are the lines we need to be thinking along (an example of Progress Is Distance) rather than just logic and algorithms.