ABSTRACT
Many people think of metaphor as something that only literature majors, poets, and English teachers consider. However, there has been much written in the last 30 years positing that metaphor is much more significant than widely believed, and that metaphorical discourse can create and reinforce personal and professional identities. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson are perhaps the best-known theorists of metaphor as a way to understand identity. In 1980, they published a seminal text, Metaphors We Live By, in which they argued that our relationship to the world is deeply metaphorical, and that metaphors form foundational, almost archetypal patterns we use to understand events and make decisions. They asserted, “a large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives” (p. 233). They also noted, “We have found … that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (p. 3).
