This Think Tank looks at metaphor, which our profession has long dealt with as a literary device, but has more recently been reframed as the brain’s way to give meaning to language. This important role was put forward by Lakoff and Johnson, whose work is featured in this issue. The Main video is a short explanation of the theory by Lakoff himself, while the More video explains how their book revolutionized the way we understand language.

Curtis Kelly starts the issue off with two stories that show the power of stories as metaphors of personal challenges. Heather Kretschmer starts the Think Tank by describing her experiences with metaphors in German, connects this process to embodied cognition, and redesigns a language activity with metaphor. Curtis Kelly looks at how the brain combines primary schema to make metaphors and suggests this process is the basis for how our brain gives meaning to all language. Then Mohammad Khari brings us back to the traditional definitions of metaphor developed in literature studies. In the PLUS section, we close the issue with a delightful blog post by one of our favorites, Maha Bali, where she proposes a number of interesting metaphors for our role as language teachers.