Lockyer and Pickering perform a linguistic analysis of the kinds of metaphorical language people use when writing letters of complaint to a particular satirical magazine, Private Eye. They find that complaints often seek metaphors of high/low that imply a kind of binary opposition between what is and is not acceptable, which reveals their purpose of setting boundaries around that which is to be taken seriously. Lockyer and Pickering discuss the way in which this kind of discourse, almost by nature, fails when encountering the satirical spirit, which defies that which is normalized, resulting in an apparent linguistic difficulty of setting bounds of any kind on satire.