ABSTRACT
Before turning to metaphors behaving badly, this chapter celebrates the constructive and creative potential of this rhetorical device. In particular, it teases out the diverse contributions metaphors make to ways of speaking that seek to describe, explain, imagine and evoke what is going on in our lives. The symbols introduced in previous chapters are employed to describe the mental processes involved in both expressive and imaginative uses of metaphor. The chapter concludes by examining how the use of metaphor—as with all rhetorical devices—is constrained within a “window of effectiveness” that is bounded by how frequently the device is used and how relevant it is to the context.
