> I don't think OP argued that this was a bad thing
Maybe, thought it wasn't clear from her initial article. I see she's now re-worded it (she removed Maggie's quote about frivolity), which indeed makes it clearer it's not a criticism, just an exploration.
Indeed, language is a heap of metaphors and idioms. It's interesting to consider which ones occur in different languages and which ones don't (in Spanish you are not "moved" by an emotion, for example).
I've barely started reading Douglas Hofstadter, but isn't all language a heap of metaphors? I mean, in a man page, how could you talk about a program without using metaphors? The closest thing you could get is probably code or pseudo-code, and even that is just the top of a massive pile of metaphors all the way down to moving electrons around.