 What makes these verbal expressions metaphorical, according to Lakoff, is the fact that they are direct, conventionally straightforward puttings-into-words of inherently metaphorical thoughts, thoughts constructed in the first place under the supervision of the single conceptual metaphor love is a journey. Activate a conceptual metaphor; use it to think a metaphorical thought; put that thought into words in the usual routine manner, provided for by the usual routine meanings of the words in question; and the result thereby counts as a verbal metaphor. Lakoff effectively defines verbal metaphor as the conventionally straightforward putting-into-words of an inherently metaphorical conceiving, an inherently metaphorical thought. Such is the application to verbal metaphor of the general cognitive linguistic principle that syntactic form is the direct expression of underlying meaning relations.