The UK's June 2016 decision to withdraw from the European Union, popularly referred to as Brexit, has had a major political, financial and economic impact worldwide. However, the impact was also linguistic as this event has generated a myriad of neologisms in English, such as breferendum, brexiteer, Brexitsphere, regrexit or Brexitology. The aim of the present study is to give a general overview of these new words, to establish the predominant word-formational patterns as well as to point out the creativity and speed with which speakers of English have reacted linguistically to this change in the socio-political context.

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Under the theoretical wing of Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Metaphor Analysis we deal with one specific aspect of economic discourse in English in an attempt to draw attention to the distinctively gendered metaphor of SLENDERNESS on which the concept of the ideal company is based today. The analysis is based on the notion of downsizing and metaphorical expressions that give linguistic voice to the LEAN IS HEALTHY metaphor. Our aim is to demonstrate how ideological values are subtly intertwined with metaphors in economic discourse, so that seemingly harmless metaphors support and reconstruct an aspect of social reality- an androcentric world view.

Set against the backdrop of a separation process between Britain and the EU, popularly referred to as Brexit, our paper explores how themarried partnersmetaphor scenario structures the Brexit discourse via vivid metaphorical images of political reality describing complicated relations between Britain and the EU. We use a critical approach to metaphor (Charteris-Black, 2004, 2005) and especially apply Musolff’s (2006) concept of ‘metaphor scenario’ to the data collection gathered from various media sources published in English during the period closely preceding and following the Brexit vote. As “themarried partnersscenario is applicable to any bilateral […] relationship” (Musolff, 2006, p. 34), by exemplifying the Britain-EU relationship via numerous lexical instantiations (e.g., rocky marriage, messy divorce very hard on the children, shotgun divorce), we attest to a great generative potential of themarried partnersscenario as well as its argumentative use. Our main aim is to point out how themarried partnersmetaphor scenario is used in political discourse both to simplify and enable the understanding of the tangled relationship between Britain and the EU at a crucial point in their history.

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