Conceptual metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is like playing with Legos! Just like how you can use one Lego piece to build different things depending on how you connect it to other pieces, we can use words or phrases in different ways depending on how we connect them to other ideas and concepts in our minds.

For example, we might use the word "love" to talk about how we feel towards our family, friends or pets. But we can also use the same word in different ways, like saying "I love pizza", which means you enjoy eating pizza a lot. This shows that we use our knowledge and experiences of one thing (like having positive feelings towards people) to understand something else (like enjoying tasty food).

This joining together of different concepts to understand something in a new way is called a conceptual metaphor. It helps us to understand and communicate complex ideas, by comparing them to something more familiar. So, like building with Legos, we can construct new meanings by connecting different ideas together.