How metaphors and analogies shape thinking, argument and explanation, and how to use them deliberately.
Writing Schemas & Propositions · 4 August 2026 · Blog post
The explainer corrects common misconceptions about language-model architecture, memory, capabilities, training, tool use, and emotional representation.
Writing AI in Academic Practice (LinkedIn) · 17 August 2023 · Blog post
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 13 June 2022 · Blog post
The piece maps maps, itineraries, briefings, and guides onto education to show that learning requires supported travel through a domain rather than preparation alone.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 6 March 2022 · Blog post
The piece explains how idiomaticity, underdetermination, and textual cohesion make metaphor translation difficult for the same reasons that translation generally is difficult.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 1 January 2021 · Blog post
The piece uses Tolkien's distinction between allegory and applicability to argue that readers continually renegotiate metaphors rather than remain confined by authorial intent.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 28 June 2020 · Blog post
The piece uses the absence of a back row and corridor to compare the learning opportunities and support deficits of virtual and physical education.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 July 2019 · Blog post
The piece argues that metaphor dynamically restructures knowledge through negotiated sensemaking rather than simply explaining abstract ideas with concrete ones.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 June 2019 · Blog post
The piece distinguishes associative, lexical, inferential, instrumental, and creative understanding as overlapping levels that require progressively richer mental representations.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 29 May 2019 · Blog post
The piece argues that metaphors support learning only when they function within sustained practice as invitations, instruments, or catalysts rather than isolated explanations.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 8 November 2018 · Blog post
The piece shows how popular retellings of Schrödinger's cat and the butterfly effect turn cautionary scientific analogies into misleading literal claims.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 7 November 2018 · Blog post
The piece identifies unresolved questions about deliberate and automatic metaphor processing, the relation between textual and conceptual metaphor, and variation in figurative understanding.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 16 October 2018 · Blog post
The piece uses infection, ignorance, and imitation as metaphors to challenge the treatment of innovation as an unqualified organisational good.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 22 May 2018 · Blog post
The piece analyses an extended comparison to show that metaphor and simile operate together within a dynamic process of discourse-based meaning construction.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 16 May 2018 · Blog post
The piece provides a selective route through Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things that prioritises its account of categories, cognitive models, embodiment, and metaphor.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 19 March 2018 · Blog post
The piece compares music and language to show that their shared structural features do not erase fundamental differences in meaning, acquisition, and dialogue.
Writing Medium · 23 June 2016 · Blog post
The piece argues that technology expresses human purposes and that generative metaphors can reveal alternative ways to design and use it.
Writing Medium · 16 February 2016 · Blog post
The piece develops a theatre metaphor for relating instructional design, lesson planning, and teachers' classroom performance.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 3 August 2014 · Blog post
The piece argues that claims about exceptional metaphor use in Indigenous American languages require comparative evidence rather than cultural stereotypes.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 4 March 2014 · Blog post
The piece explains metaphor as conceptual modelling and argues that every interaction with the world applies partial cognitive models.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 14 December 2013 · Blog post
The piece explains forms of metonymy and shows how metonymic connections shape imagery, inference, and public discourse.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 27 October 2013 · Blog post
The piece argues that metaphors generate insight only when their partial mappings are not mistaken for complete identities.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 13 April 2013 · Blog post
The piece classifies metaphor use by cognitive, social, and textual functions and by degrees of salience and recoverability.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 26 August 2012 · Blog post
The piece argues that people must use conceptual clichés while continually negotiating which ones guide judgement and action.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 22 July 2012 · Blog post
The piece shows how an architectural comparison between Google and Facebook becomes misleading when its mappings and alternatives are examined.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 31 March 2012 · Blog post
The conference abstract proposes that speakers collectively negotiate metaphors while remaining susceptible to their political force.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 2 November 2011 · Blog post
The piece extends the moral-compass metaphor to show that ethical judgement requires contextual calibration and changing direction.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 10 July 2011 · Blog post
The piece uses two sudden losses of familiar access codes to question established models and metaphors of memory.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 3 June 2011 · Blog post
The piece argues that Niall Ferguson's killer-app metaphor misrepresents historical change and supplies superficial context for teaching.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 24 April 2011 · Blog post
The piece argues that interpreting imagery in a nearly non-figurative poem requires the same conceptual mapping used for metaphor.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 3 April 2011 · Blog post
The piece asks why political discourse rarely extends the hawk-and-dove metaphor to hawks hunting doves.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 20 February 2011 · Blog post
The piece argues that comparing schools with competing restaurants conceals the costs and complexities of educational markets.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 6 August 2010 · Blog post
The piece argues that literal and metaphorical utterances both depend on contextual knowledge and mappings between conceptual domains.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 4 August 2010 · Blog post
The piece uses the tortoise and hare fable to challenge simple contrasts between digital and traditional scholarship.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 30 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece argues that reframing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can expose assumptions but cannot replace political work and material power.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 21 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece shares an XKCD comic about distinctions among analogies, metaphors, and similes.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 18 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece presents a five-step method for identifying, testing, and extending metaphorical mappings.
Writing Metaphor Hacker · 18 July 2010 · Blog post
The piece defines metaphor hacking as examining and reconstructing the conceptual frames used in thought and language.
Writing Researchity · 5 July 2010 · Blog post
This note points to a presentation that uses swarm metaphors to describe research practice.
Dominik Lukeš
Research Cognitive Linguistics · 2008 · Review
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 24 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that evolutionary metaphors for language preservation overstate the universal value of every linguistic and cultural feature.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 11 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that journalistic anecdotes acquire truth through negotiated interpretation and that verification checklists cannot remove this dependence.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 11 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece shows how criticism of a bookstore's supplier language unpacks market metaphors and contests their interpretive privilege.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 7 August 2007 · Blog post
The piece analyses schematic euphemisms in Iraq war reporting and asks how discourse analysis can avoid disguising political participation as objectivity.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 2 July 2007 · Blog post
The piece shows that historical analogies depend on opportunistic mappings whose aptness must be negotiated against the record.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 30 June 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses the phrase liberal fascism to show how generative analogies are judged through negotiated aptness and credibility rather than truth alone.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 17 June 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that rejecting an explicit metaphor does not remove the conceptual integration embedded in ordinary narrative description.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 8 May 2007 · Blog post
The piece uses reactions to a French presidential campaign to illustrate the political impulse to construct analogies across countries and candidates.
Talks University of Sheffield · May 2007 · Talk
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 27 April 2007 · Blog post
The piece shows how an explicitly named war metaphor organises the imagery and cohesion of an otherwise descriptive political text.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 23 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece argues that word meanings and causal analogies are negotiated in discourse rather than supplied as fixed consequences of language.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 10 March 2007 · Blog post
The piece shows how an Apple Lisa advertisement visually negotiated the mapping between an office desk and a computer desktop.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 January 2007 · Blog post
The piece analyses how ritual qualifications and historical analogies preserve the symbolic significance of the September 11 attacks while permitting criticism.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 January 2007 · Blog post
The piece explains Hillary Clinton's joke as an underspecified analogy whose possible mappings hardened during subsequent public interpretation.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 17 January 2007 · Blog post
The piece analyses a fatal water-drinking contest as sound-based metonymy and negotiated symbolic action.
Dominik Lukeš
Research University of Sheffield · 2007 · Talk with slides
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 29 October 2006 · Blog post
The piece analyses how Team America's final anatomical analogy can override the film's broader critique of American interventionism.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 21 October 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that public discussion uses analogies to negotiate conceptual frames and the communicative medium at the same time.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 16 September 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that metaphors can describe complex experiences more accurately than adjectives because readers construct richer mental images from them.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 11 May 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that an analogy between feminism and Islam reproduces teleological history and accepts distorted accounts of both movements' visible extremes.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 27 April 2006 · Blog post
The piece analyses a conservationist account that connects biological, linguistic, and cultural diversity through an alternative narrative of change.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 6 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece uses an urban-planning metaphor to explain how coding methods constrain and enable visual web design.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 6 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece examines Pandora's genome metaphor and compares expert music classification with automated and collective recommendation systems.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 6 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece argues that school vouchers overextend a market metaphor that cannot represent education's multiple participants, purposes, and social consequences.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 1 January 2006 · Blog post
The piece defines analogies as elaborated metaphors and outlines their cognitive, textual, and interactive functions.
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2006 · Journalism
The explainer traces social capital theory, its measures and political appeal, and the limitations of treating social relationships as capital.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 25 December 2005 · Blog post
The post compares meaning-making to continuously adjusting a musical note in order to challenge static and minimal definitions of concepts.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 22 November 2005 · Blog post
The post identifies an extended political analogy as a cohesive frame that holds an argument together.
Writing Hermeneutic Heretic · 21 November 2005 · Blog post
The post examines Bosnia as an analogy for Iraq and asks how private analogies become established structures for public reasoning.
Writing Britské listy · 28 February 2005 · Journalism
The piece argues that political scandals become intelligible through competing metaphors that select different causes and responsibilities.
Dominik Lukeš
Research Metaphor @ UEA, University of East Anglia, Norwich · 2005 · Talk with slides
Dominik Lukeš
Research University of East Anglia, Norwich · 2005 · Talk with slides
Dominik Lukeš
Research Proceedings of the Third Interdisciplinary Workshop on Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language · 2005 · Paper
Dominik Lukeš
Research Corpus-based metaphor-classification record · 2005 · Talk with slides
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2003 · Journalism
The column shows how George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein used metaphor to frame the Iraq War while avoiding or redirecting the word war itself.
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2003 · Journalism
The essay explains how metaphors such as war on terror and Saddam as Hitler frame political reasoning and make military action appear necessary.
Writing Lidové noviny · c. 2001 · Journalism
The piece treats left-brain and right-brain preferences as a teaching metaphor and argues that lessons should support both analytical and intuitive learners.
Writing Literární noviny · Journalism
The piece argues that the metaphor of war on terrorism obscures political causes and allows fear to redefine democratic priorities.
Writing Lidové noviny · Journalism
The piece argues that education policy often mistakes suggestive similarities and metaphors for causal evidence about prosperity, democracy, employment, and literacy.
Writing Lidové noviny · Journalism
The piece argues that British Czech studies cannot be valued only through market returns because they sustain cultural understanding, scholarship, and mutual national interests.
Writing Literární noviny · Journalism
The piece argues that metaphors of ownership and theft distort debates about copying, creativity, and intellectual property.
Agent skills Agent skill
Helps an agent use and examine metaphors without over-extending them.
Websites Site
Essays on metaphor, language, and cognition.
Apps Teaching tools
Explore new perspectives through generative metaphors.
Writing Lidové noviny · Journalism
The essay argues that treating Saddam Hussein as a metonym for all Iraqi history prevents serious comparison between his regime and post-invasion Iraq.
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