A Chilly Climate for Women?

I’m enjoying this blog!

I frequently fantasize about asking writers to start over and rewrite their work with no metaphors at all (and I sometimes make myself do this). I suspect that many writers use metaphors unconsciously without ever being able to plainly state their ideas. And I wonder whether the writers are truly familiar with their own content.  

My favorite specimen of a mixed metaphor observed in the wild is from a circa-1989 profile of the Go-Gos’ Belinda Carlisle. It refers to a period of substance abuse, so the clash of symbols might be intentional,but there’s no way to know. She was “a one-woman time bomb drowning in a fairy tale gone bad.”

I, too, am enjoying this blog. 

Last Quarter I realized that one of my metaphors was lost on a great many of my students.  When met with eyerolling as I explained in detail the writing assignment for the week, I used the expression.  “Don’t overthink it, you are not writing the great American novel.” Faced with students, the majority of whom take little time to read, (perhaps 3 out of 50), I am distressed that I must retire my favorite metaphor.  Alas. 

Overworked perhaps, but “it is what it is” acquired a mysterious metaphysical depth when I started teaching [voluntarily] in a women’s prison.

Ace, the prison tatoo artist, misses class week after week; she’s in lockdown for “altering state property.”  It is what it is.

One of the officers [don't ever call them guards] has been spotted night after night in the shadows outside one of the ranges, performing lewd acts.  It is what it is.

The jailhouse lawyer dies in her sleep after being moved without warning into the intake range. No one ever hears the results of the toxicology report.  It is what it is.

The governor shuts down the prison and the inmates are moved to facilities upstate and downstate. Classes end.  It is what it is.

Actually, “mounting pressure to gut” is a borborygmus, not a metaphor.

I fondly remember what is perhaps the ultimate mixed metaphor reprinted in the New Yorker from the Albany Times-Mirror. It involved “flogging a straw herring in midstream,” and was followed by a description of “politicians running around with their heads in the sand.”

I vote that someone look into “robust.”

I teach English as a second language for academic purposes, and my students are proud of their cliches in English because they feel it means they are learning English better. For them they are not cliches, they are new words and expressions that give them insight into the language and culture.

Citing Orwell in support of stylistic purity is a hackneyed excuse for failing to think independently. Mixed metaphors are as venerable as Plato, whose dialectic gently draws forth and leads up the soul sunk in the barbaric slough of the Orphic myth, in the Republic 7.533d. Likewise, in Timaeus 81c-d, when the root of the triangles that form the elements of living creatures grows slack owing to their having fought many fights during long periods, they are no longer able to divide the entering triangles of the food and assimilate them to themselves, but are themselves easily divided by those which enter from without. Most notably, criticasters have agonized over Hamlet echoing the proverbial Greek usage of “thalassa kakon” in proposing “to take arms against a sea of troubles”. Thus Alexander Pope proposed amending “sea” to “siege”, whereas William Warburton advocated the reading “assail of troubles”. For my part, upon being confronted with such noisome cavils, I repeat the immortal slogan of Sir Boyle Roche: “Mr Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and  darkening the sky; but I’ll nip him in the bud.”

To abelragen, The person  usually credited with the theory that acquired characteristics are passed down via heredity was Lamarck, not Remarck.

Hello Ben:

Thank you for a very entertaining and sharp insight of our
language patterns.

I have a pet peeve about a phrase that needs to be
eliminated from students’ writing: Thinking outside of the box.  To me, that is the worst, tired, over-used cliché. And if I ask a student what that means, I usually get a blank look as they try
to explain it.  What do you think?

Dr. J