George Lakoff (Bayonne, New Jersey, 1941) is a linguist and cognitive scientist. He has been a professor at the University of California and also at Harvard and Michigan Universities. He is currently director of the Centre for the Neural Mind & Society at the University of California. Lakoff is the founder of generative linguistics, which shifts the focus of grammar from syntax to meaning, but he is best known for his theory of conceptual metaphor, which argues that metaphors allow us to structure concepts based on others, and for his political analyses related to the subject.