The literary imagination may take flight on the wings of metaphor, but hard-headed scientists are just as likely as doe-eyed poets to reach for a metaphor when the descriptive need arises. Metaphor is a pervasive aspect of every genre of text and every register of speech, and is as useful for describing the inner workings of a «black hole» (itself a metaphor) as it is the affairs of the human heart. The ubiquity of metaphor in natural language thus poses a significant challenge for Natural...
