The article examines contemporary key words that circulate in the information field of mass communication and traces their semantic dynamics under conditions of interdiscursivity in media discourse. The study aims to show how metaphorization and conceptualization drive meaning extension, intensify evaluative load, and stabilize recurrent interpretive scenarios in public discussion. The theoretical framework combines cognitive-linguistic views of meaning as a product of conceptualization with the embodied-cognition perspective that links abstract sense-making to sensorimotor experience. The material includes cross-genre media contexts (news reports, analytical pieces, interviews, headline complexes, and social-media posts) that capture lexical “migration” across topical domains. Methodologically, the research employs cognitive-discursive analysis, metaphor identification procedures in the spirit of MIP/MIPVU, and reconstruction of recurrent source–target mappings and frame structures. Results demonstrate that stable models such as contamination/cleansing, support/strength, path/acceleration, and virus/struggle systematically expand the semantics of key words, provide normative evaluation, and make interpretations more predictable. The growth of collocational and derivational productivity correlates with increasing connotativity and turns a lexeme into an argumentative marker and an explanatory label. The findings support the conclusion that, within the media environment, a number of key words shift from primarily nominative use toward a concept-like status and begin to organize the meaning space of the present time.