Metaphors we live by: a company is like a ship
In their seminal 1980 book, ‘Metaphors We Live By‘, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggested that metaphors are a tool that allow us to use what we know about our physical and social environment to understand more – and to talk abut – abstract things like time, emotions, work and mental activity.
They also looked at the way that conceptual metaphors help us to come up with new phrases and idioms. For instance, one common conceptual metaphor is the way we understand time in terms of money – hence expressions like spending time on your own, wasting someone’s precious...