Migration as a metaphor for metaphor

This article is concerned with migration as a metaphor for metaphor. Metaphor is generally recognised an essential tool in the promotion of public understanding of difficult subjects and this begs the question of what metaphors are available for promoting the understanding of metaphor itself. A review of metaphors for metaphor is undertaken and they are found to be of three types, based on seeing, travelling and thinking. It is argued that recent developments in migration studies may have something to offer metaphor studies and migration is proposed as a metaphor for re-framing metaphors for metaphor.