What is it about?
This is a light-hearted piece that takes a look at some of the issues raised when identifying metaphors in discourse: what dictionary are you supposed to use? I discuss the problems with the dictionary often recommended for this, but more generally wonder what value a lexical (as opposed to a discourse) approach to metaphor identification has.
Why is it important?
There are two procedures for identifying metaphors in discourse that seem to be valued when getting one's work published (i.e. MIP [Pragglejaz Group, 2007] and MIPVU [Steen et al, 2010]). It seems to me that there has been far too little discussion and feedback on these proposals and that editors and reviewers may be overly confident that these procedures return reliable (or interesting) results. We need to submit them to more critical appraisal.