George Lakoff in a nutshell is a linguist.
   He was in direct competition with Chomsky in the early 1960s.
   Because Chomsky's conceptualizations of linguistics meshed VERY
   well with the growing early stages of computing, Chomsky won.

   Lakoff continued with his theories and found new footing in the
   late 1970s basing our understanding of things on Metaphors
   rather than Chomsky's Language Generator. [I might have the name
   of it wrong].

   Flash forward a little later, and he expanded it into the
   concept of Embodied Cognition.

   Now, like Chomsky, he works heavily in political work; Lakoff
   advising current democrats on the proper ways to write speeches
   and Chomsky taking more an an activist role in politics but both
   have similar political leanings.

   While Chomsky is still king in Linguistics (he's the only thing
   in what's considered linguistics now - or at least, very
   nearly); Lakoff has been gaining some footing with his metaphor
   and embodied cognition concepts via cognitive science; brain
   scans have shown how the metaphors we use show up as literal in
   the brain, proving tentatively some of his ideas.

   [which also proved some of Heidegger's ideas, such as the hammer
   being an extension of the body; in the brain, indeed it is].