Andy van Dam's Hypertext '87 keynote ended with a discussion of Andy's Nine Issues deserving of further thought.
The function of metaphor is exposed here: an ideological disciplining of the future, masked as a mode of Enquiring Helpfulness.
This helps us think about what we go through when we try to name things according to the values we'd like to see them promote in the future. The metaphor itself is staking a claim, in an attempt to freeze ambiguity of purpose at some optimal point.
quote
##7. Don't Metaphor Me In
But we don't want to put things together in such a way that there is one point of view, because if we've learned one thing from interactive tools up to now is that multiview is the way people work.
You can not have it just one way.
We need an update to Larry Tesler's "Don't mode me in." Jim Foley and I recently came up with "Don't metaphor me in." Don't give me a little card image and say, "That's all you've got, because that's what I thought you should want for your virtual shoebox." There have got to be multiple modalities and the designers have to be able to deal with that. So that was issue number seven: don't metaphor me in, don't give me only one way of looking at things.