This paper argues that the general notion of an image metaphor, which has been traditionally confined to so-called “one-shot metaphors”, as used in literary and poetic language, could be expanded to describe many expressions that are found in everyday language. Following Caballero (2003a), it is argued that the division in cognitive linguistics of metaphors into “image” and “conceptual” is over-simplistic. It is shown that many of the most frequent metaphors in this study have characteristics which would qualify them for inclusion in both categories. It is also argued that connotational meaning is an important characteristic of these expressions, unifying their literal and non-literal meanings. A detailed analysis of the Bank of English corpus concordance for heel shows the numerical importance of such metaphors. The paper refers to research into metaphor that takes an emergentist perspective, and which has led a number of other existing distinctions to be questioned. It is argued that these expressions, termed “metaphoremes”, which are difficult to classify using existing distinctions, should be regarded as prototypical on the grounds of their frequency, rather than as anomalous.