Metaphors to Live By

Looking for some ideas about metaphors, I came across a lot of references to George Lakoff and his 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By.

This link is to the University of Chicago Press' page for Metaphors We Live By and their description of the book:

People use metaphors every time they speak. Some of those metaphors are literary--devices for making thoughts more vivid or entertaining. But most are much more basic than that--they're "metaphors we live by," metaphors we use without even realizing we're using them. In this book, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that these basic metaphors not only affect the way we communicate ideas, but actually structure our perceptions and understandings from the beginning. Bringing together the perspectives of linguistics and philosophy, they offer an intriguing and surprising guide to some of the most common metaphors and what they can tell us about the human mind. And for this new edition, they supply an afterword both extending their arguments and offering a fascinating overview of the current state of thinking on the subject of metaphor.

This seems to have become a very influential work. Some excerpts are available online. Lakoff is professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley. He published " Metaphors of Terror" on Sept. 16, 2001.

Other references

Literature Annotations by Audrey Shafer

English course notes by Janet H. Murray

Metaphor Center: "Center for the Cognitive Science of Metaphor Online"

Review of Lakoff & Johnson: "Philosophy in the Flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought"