The main object of this thesis on popular figurative language is to try to explain the relationshipbetween an artifact and its designation, i.e., to try to explain why a certain object has been namedfor an animal and what the people who used the word were attempting to describe with the help ofthis animal designation. The work thus belongs to the category within linguistics that is commonlycalled Wörter und Sachen (`words and objects'), with a main focus on the study of objects.

The paper deals broadly with linguistic expressions (tool designations) and meanings originating in a metaphor of some kind and also with possible developments of meaning originating in alinguistic metaphor that has been lexicalized with a certain usage. Since metaphor is now an all-embracing concept, a distinction is made between conceptual metaphors and linguistic metaphors.It is especially the linguistic metaphor and its meanings and usages that are of interest in this thesis.The lexicalized linguistic metaphor is called a special designation and has its origin in a subjectword, for example cat, horse, bed or table.

The basis for a special designation is made up of three types of metaphors: the image metaphor, the abstract similarity metaphor and the correlational metaphor. Special designations or metaphors constitute a "theme" with a specific import that is manifested in the various tools that are "variations on the theme". Apart from different kinds of metaphors, other linguistic phenomena are also discussed in the thesis, such as polysemy, homonymy, metonymy and meaning development, in an attempt to elucidate the intricate relationship between word and object. The animal designations studied in the thesis in their metaphoric usage as the names of tools and utility goods are:björn 'bear', bock 'buck', get 'goat', katt 'cat', kråka 'crow', märr 'mare', räv 'fox' and trana 'crane'.