Metaphor is booming business. Since the publication of Ortony’s (1979/1993) Metaphor and thought and Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Metaphors we live by, it has become a central object of study in psychology, philosophy, linguistics, poetics, history, anthropology, discourse studies, and other disciplines. Since 1986, there has been a scholarly journal called Metaphor and Symbol (originally entitled Metaphor and Symbolic Activity), and 2006 saw the foundation of a scholarly association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM). A recent overview of research has been published as the Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought (Gibbs 2008), covering a wide range of theoretical, empirical, and applied issues. Contrary to the traditional picture of metaphor as deviant, erratic, ornamental, and spurious, metaphor has been shown to be important to human experience in many different ways.