INTRODUCTION

Common-sense traditional teaching often presents metaphor as an anomaly, an unusual or deviant way of using language, a minority interest, or something you do in literature class. Taking a similar view, philosophers have often wanted metaphor strictly confined to literature, rhetoric and art, because of its supposed dangers to clear thinking. Locke, for example, denounced figurative language as follows:

But yet, if we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that… all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment, and so indeed are perfect cheat.