Cognitive metaphors

[Richard]

While looking for something else, I accidentally came across a database of cognitive metaphors: http://web.archive.org/web/200807180217 ... metaphors/
This gives a long list of standard metaphors with examples. A couple of my favourites:
IDEAS are FOOD: That class gave me food for thought. His idea was half-baked. He insisted on sugar-coating his warnings. She has an insatiable curiosity.
PEOPLE are PLANTS: She's a late bloomer. She is in the flower of youth. She's let herself go to seed.

Any favourites? Any ideas how to exploit this in research?

[stevelouw]

This is fun. For research, it certainly could useful for a metaphor analysis of interviews. When looking at beliefs, the way people describe their worlds using metaphors is useful. There is a paper by Farrell titled 'The teacher is an octopus' (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10 ... 4cG2YgisHU) which is a metaphor analysis of teachers' beliefs about the classroom ('teaching is war' was one that came from that paper too, I think). When I considering doing a metaphor analysis on my interview data, I found it hard to get started with identifying metaphors. Perhaps this site would have been a good way for me to have got a foot in, so to speak. Research is a journey, you see.

Anyway, the ones I like from this site are:
'the mind is a brittle object' - 'his mind snapped', 'he's fragile';
'ideas are food' - 'let me chew on that for a while', and 'I'm tired of warmed-over theories'. There are a lot of subcategories in the 'ideas are food' metaphor. Such sweet concepts!