Findings are summarized from Grevy's 2002 University of Aarhus (Denmark) doctoral dissertation project on the use of metaphors in a sample of 10 personal computer magazines. An empirical constructivist approach to a corpus of 6,000 metaphors identified in the text sample is defended against both the methodology of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's (1999) cognitive semantics and the philosophical foundation of their criticism. The project is argued to show that metaphors are not especially creative and do not have a concretizing function; as the primary purpose of metaphors is to enable one area of knowledge to be used in another, they are particularly likely to occur in technical language where new experience and knowledge must be verbalized; metaphors are to be seen more as a tool for coherent discussion of new areas than as a cognitive tool. (J. Hitchcock in LLBA 2003, vol. 37, n. 2)