IDEAS

The Kinds of Metaphor

Structural, orientational, ontological — the toolkit for reading the frames that govern economic thought.

BY fake-goya

15 July 2026 · 4 min read

Some sentences in British politics land less like arguments than like facts about the world. The country has 'run out of money'. The government has 'maxed out the nation's credit card' and must 'balance the books'. 'Tax relief' is owed to the taxpayer. 'The markets' must be kept calm, or they will 'punish' us. None of these is a neutral description. Each is a metaphor, and each is already doing work — deciding what can be thought before the argument has begun.1,2

That is not a flaw in political language; it is how language works. You have never simply had an argument — you attack a position, defend a claim, shoot one down, and win or lose (ARGUMENT IS WAR). You spend, save, waste and run out of time (TIME IS MONEY). The metaphor is the structure of the thought, a level beneath the words, and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's achievement in Metaphors We Live By was to sort these structures into kinds. The catalogue below is the instrument this series will use.3,4

Structural metaphors

One whole domain is mapped onto another, carrying its internal logic across. ARGUMENT IS WAR — 'your claims are indefensible', 'he attacked every weak point'. TIME IS MONEY — 'you're wasting my time', 'this gadget will save you hours'. IDEAS ARE OBJECTS you put into words and get across; LABOUR IS A RESOURCE to be quantified and used. Whatever the source domain contains, the target quietly inherits.3,4,5,6

Orientational metaphors

An abstraction is pinned to a direction in space — almost always up or down — through the body. The up-family is long: MORE IS UP ('the numbers keep going up'), GOOD IS UP ('things are looking up'), HEALTH AND LIFE ARE UP ('the peak of health'), HIGH STATUS IS UP ('a lofty position'), VIRTUE IS UP ('high-minded', 'high standards'), HAVING CONTROL IS UP ('on top of the situation'), HAPPY IS UP ('I'm feeling up'), RATIONAL IS UP ('let's raise the discussion to a rational level'). None is arbitrary; each is grounded in a bodily experience — pour more in and the level rises; illness and death lay you low.7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14

Ontological metaphors

Something with no edges — an activity, an emotion, an abstraction — is turned into a thing, and the kind splits into three subtypes. First, entity and substance: INFLATION IS AN ENTITY ('inflation is lowering our standard of living') lets an abstraction be named, measured and blamed as a cause; THE MIND IS A BRITTLE OBJECT ('her ego is very fragile') lets it be handled or broken.15,16

Second, the container: a bounded thing with an inside and an outside, an in and an out. ACTIVITIES ARE CONTAINERS ('how did you get out of washing the windows?'); VISUAL FIELDS ARE CONTAINERS ('the ship is coming into view'); a race, a state, a mood are all things you are in or out of.17,18

Third, and sharpest, personification — the abstraction becomes a person. INFLATION IS AN ADVERSARY ('inflation has attacked the foundations of our economy'); INFLATION IS A CONSUMER ('inflation is eating up our profits'). Once a force is a person, it can be given motives, blamed, negotiated with — and declared war on.19,20

Beneath all three sit the primary metaphors — small, near-universal mappings learned in infancy straight from the body: AFFECTION IS WARMTH (a child held close), KNOWING IS SEEING, MORE IS UP. The hundreds of richer metaphors are composed from these. Lakoff came to regard the neat three-way split as his own simplification; the real inventory runs to hundreds.21,22,23

What every metaphor does

Every metaphor is partial. It highlights the aspects of its target that match the source and leaves the rest in shadow. ARGUMENT IS WAR foregrounds the winning and losing and hides everything cooperative about argument — that the other person is giving you their time, that you might both end up closer to the truth. The hiding is how the metaphor does its work: it makes one story about the thing feel like the whole of it.24

You don't have a choice as to whether to think metaphorically. Since the mechanism of metaphor is largely unconscious, we will think and speak metaphorically, whether we know it or not.George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

Two properties of the machinery explain a great deal about political language. Because the deepest metaphors are bodily and unconscious, the frames built on them feel like perception rather than opinion: 'growth is up and up is good' is not experienced as an argument, so arguing against it sounds like arguing for a fall. And because every metaphor hides as much as it shows, a frame draws resistance the moment its hidden part is exposed — or its construction is caught out, as when the phrase 'tax relief' is revealed as something a pollster engineered to make cutting tax feel like lifting a weight.7,24,26

The instrument, and what it is for

With the catalogue in hand the opening frames can be read off. 'The country has run out of money' is an ontological substance metaphor: money made into stuff that can be exhausted. 'The nation's credit card' is structural: the state fitted into the moral world of a household. 'The markets punish' is personification, granting a price movement agency and a verdict. 'Growth' is orientational, always up and so always good. Each can now be named, and its hiding located.1,27

This is the base machinery: the catalogue of categories, and the two facts about how they work — that they hide as much as they show, and that they run below the level at which we argue. What follows in this series takes the instrument to specific political frames, one at a time — the manufacture of a crisis, the household that cannot run out of money, the frames of competence and control — to read how each is built, what it lights up, and what it keeps in the dark.

Notes

  1. Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money
  2. Labour has maxed out Britain's credit card, says Cameron — conservativehome.com ↗
  3. Metaphors We Live By
  4. Metaphors We Live By
  5. Metaphors We Live By
  6. Metaphors We Live By
  7. Metaphors We Live By
  8. Metaphors We Live By
  9. Metaphors We Live By
  10. Metaphors We Live By
  11. Metaphors We Live By
  12. Metaphors We Live By
  13. Metaphors We Live By
  14. Metaphors We Live By
  15. Metaphors We Live By
  16. Metaphors We Live By
  17. Metaphors We Live By
  18. Metaphors We Live By
  19. Metaphors We Live By
  20. Metaphors We Live By
  21. Metaphors We Live By
  22. Metaphors We Live By
  23. Metaphors We Live By
  24. Metaphors We Live By
  25. Metaphors We Live By
  26. Words That Work
  27. L. Randall Wray, Modern Money Theory

Sources

Books

  • Ann Pettifor, The Production of Money
  • L. Randall Wray, Modern Money Theory
  • Metaphors We Live By
  • Words That Work

Reporting & data