Through his language theories, the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure proposed the idea of a stable link between words and their meanings. Post structuralist analyses of poets like Stéphane Mallarmé shows that the decontextualized sign is unstable and that it's possible to create a game of shifting meaning through manipulation of context. Metaphor theorists have later observed that experienced basic concepts like up and down are stable, and that we use concepts related to these to emphasize analogous dynamics in more diffuse experiences like emotions and love. The anchor of meanings has gone from being the language to the experience.