I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them.  I wrote about that quite a few years ago in:

I suggested that a classification of metaphor had better focused on their use rather than inherent nature. I came up with the heuristic device of: cognitive, social and textual uses of metaphor.

Some of the uses I came up with (inspired by the literature from Halliday to Lakoff) were:

• Cognitive
  • Conceptual (constitutive)
    • Explanative
    • Generative
  • Attributive
• Social (Interpersonal)
  • Conceptual/Declarative (informational)
  • Figurative (elegant variation)
  • Innovative
  • Exegetic
  • Prevaricative
  • Performative
• Textual
  • Cohesive (anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric)
  • Coherent
    • Local
    • Global

I also posited a continuum of salience and recoverability in metaphors:

• High salience and recoverability
• Low salience and recoverability

Read the entire paper here.

My thinking on metaphor has moved on since then - I see it as a special case of framing and conceptual integration rather than a sui generis concept - but I still find this a useful guide to return to when confronted with metaphor use.