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CONCEPTUAL BLENDINGFauconnier and Turner's (2002) theory of conceprual blending is a prominent theory of howhumans interrelate and integrate concepts while they gain new insights about their environment.According to Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 46-47) conceprual blending accounts for a person'scognitive capacity to interrelate and blend conceprs extracted from his ,'ast conceprual network ofknowledge. It is a symbolisation process that selectively interrelates concepts from two separatecognitive domains, a source space and a target space to conceptualise a new perceived relationshipknown as a blendedspace. Tbe process is used in the perception of all kinds of symbolicinterrelationships. Taking Fauconnier and Turner (2002) as point of departure Klopper (2003: 293)explains that one extracts apparendy unrelated, but comparable concepts from one's broad domains ofknowledge by associating them with one another in two smaller sets of knowledge. These smaller setsare termed source and target spaces. Fauconnier and Tumer (2002: 217) call them input spaces in thetheory.People in different disciplines have different ways of thinking. Fauconnier and Turner (2002:17) stress that the adult and child do not think alike. The mind of the genius differs from that of theaverage person and that automatic thinking, of the sort we do when reading a simple sentence, is farbeneath the imaginative thinking that goes on during the writing ofa poem.Fauconnier and Turner (2002: 21) explain that the general purpose of conceptual blending is tounderstand that which is new or abstract in terms of that which is known or concrete. 'Ibe act ofblending enWls that we analogically equate entities that we generallv consider to be different insignificant respects bv focusing on une:-,pected similarities between them. It is the unexpectedsimilarities that enable us to project the features of the concrete entity onto the abstract entity, therebyarriving at a new understanding or blend of the abstract entitv. "\CCOtding to Fauconnict and Turner(2002: 217) people pretend, imitate, lie, fantasize, decen'e, delude, considet altematives. simulate, makemodels, and propose hypotheses. Our species has >ill extraordinary ability to operate mentally on theunreal, and this ability depends on our capacity for am-anced conceprual integration.Klopper (2003: 3(1) san that hutnalls reconceptualise the basic constituents of m""ning all thetime. W'hen a prominent official in the Republican .\dministration of the L nited States of .\merica,spoke on CN'N in 200I shortly after the September 11 attacks on the L'S,\, he said: IFe 1J>i// drain theswamp wmre they are hidin,g and eradicate thelll' He essentiallv reclassified human opponents as nonhumanones, implying that their attacks on the LS,\ were inhuman. In Fauconnier and Turner's terminology,this amounts to a compression of t\.vo separate outer space lexical categories (human bei/~gand flonbumafllite jimn) into a new categon' (inhullIan hUllIan). Kenneth Bigln was kidnapped on 16 September 2lK4.36