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Some theorists have suggested that metaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well.

In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action.

A common definition of a metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way.

They explain how a metaphor is simply understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.

The authors call this concept a ‘ conduit metaphor .’ By this they meant that a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it.

In other words, communication is something that ideas go into.

The container is separate from the ideas themselves.

Lakoff and Johnson give several examples of daily metaphors we use, such as “ argument is war ” and “ time is money .” Metaphors are widely used in context to describe personal meaning.

The authors also suggest that communication can be viewed as a machine: “ Communication is not what one does with the machine, but is the machine itself .” ( Johnson, Lakoff, 1980 ).