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This paper studies metaphor as a part of the linguistic code in a discipline's professional communicative spheres and, most important, metaphor as a knowledge-transferring mechanism where concepts from one discipline are transferred into the domain of another discipline. Donald Schön's so-called 'generative metaphor' is introduced and applied to the 'static' structure of disciplinary terminology by analyzing one characteristic example of metaphorical transfer of linguistic theory and terminology into the domain of the information sciences. The paper concludes with some ideas on a research project, taking explicitly the metaphorical stance towards the relations between different disciplines and terminologies.