Pop!Tech · CC BY 2.0

A cognitive linguist at UC Berkeley whose 1980 book Metaphors We Live By, written with Mark Johnson, argued that abstract thought is structured by the physical metaphors embedded in ordinary language. He extended the idea into politics with Moral Politics, proposing that conservative and liberal worldviews correspond to competing family metaphors for the state, and later applied the same framing analysis to how the first Bush administration sold the Persian Gulf War to the public.