You don't just talk about arguments like wars — you think about them that way

'He attacked my position', 'I demolished his argument', 'she won the debate' — English talks about arguing almost entirely in terms of combat. Lakoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By showed such patterns aren't decoration: everyday metaphors like 'argument is war' actually structure how we reason about the thing itself, not just how we describe it.

— George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By — University of Chicago Press, 1980
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