Studying gestures in language use offers the opportunity to uncover fundamental properties of metaphor which so far have received little interest - if at all. This is a shift towards studying metaphor as it is used, and it has important theoretical consequences because it reveals that metaphoricity is dynamic; it indicates that the speaker establishes or creates metaphoricity online through a general cognitive process, which is in principle modality independent. These facets of metaphor were uncovered through linguistic microanalyses of multi-modal segments of talk or discourse. Online cogniti.