ABSTRACT
Metaphor is at both extremes, infancy and the pinnacles of science. The metaphors of measurement enter the picture where amounts of value must be accounted for, two things for one, five pounds of this for three yards of that. Imaginative metaphors are highly in evidence in the tools that ordinary people invent and use, because old terms are constantly pressed into use by analogy. The euphemistic and dysphemistic metaphors are the ones with widest appeal, for they mask their partisan nature through a connection with something that is naturally good or bad. A nomadic society may push the metaphor no farther; a settled agricultural one may extend it to the ownership of land, and with that step the earth is the limit, long after the agricultural beginnings are forgotten. In a society that views itself as fundamentally an economy, economic beliefs and practices guide the metaphoric structuring of reality.
