Revenge of the Metaphor

[crowleycrow]

Treating metaphors as merelycolorful ways of saying things can irritate them, and sometimes they bite. In a local arts & culture magazine, an aricle about how hard it was to restore Emily Dickinson's house. It was helped by the discovery of some fragments of wall paper still adhering to surfaces. "Discovery of the wall paper fragments...lit a a

Comments

[movingfinger]

Only today I commented to a friend on the headline, "Google names auto veteran to lead self-driving car push."

[crowleycrow]

Ha! You have to suppose that no one including the writer ever reads one of these twice. No time.

from Billy A

[anonymous]

I get my news from substantially lower sources like Yahoo page clickbait. Articles relating to cannabis have headlines like "Pot Initiative Goes Up In Smoke", High Times For Reefer Market", "Referendum To Be a Joint Effort", you name it.

Re: from Billy A

[crowleycrow]

That sort of foolery is on purpose, and can be funny or groanworthy. Rarer and more delicious arfe the ones the writer committed without knowing.

[pgdf]

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/may/23/rules-writing-block-metaphor

[crowleycrow]

"Metaphors, new or shopworn, work when they bring things into sharper focus." Was that a clever way of showing you that you can get away with unnoticed mixed metaphors? A "shopworn" metaphor bringing something "into sharper focus" -- mixing the commercial with the ophthalmological.

[anonymous]

There is of course the dead metaphor, the lurker in the pack. Shopworn may be one to the author who is English but not to the reader from elsewhere. Chair,Crown,Secretary,Cabinet - furnishings once used as metaphor now make the man. Mixing dead metaphors with live ones awakens the long-dead ones. I dig it. Love the wallpaper.

[mark_pentecost]

I think you’re too hard on the writer here. As I read it, the metaphorical fire was lit by the discovery of the wallpaper, not by the wallpaper itself, the discovery being both a physical & a psychological event, a different kind of object than wallpaper (more temporal than spatial perhaps, but I guess I don’t have to tell you that when we try to talk about time, the distinction between literal & metaphorical gets slippery, we have such a poor grasp of the literal referent of “time," although I, obviously, have too much time on my hands). The fire was not lit under the house; if the metaphorical flames consume anybody, it’s the directors and governors. The metaphor may be a cliché, but I think it’s used correctly: enthusiasm/motivation is (like) fire; weak motivation is (like} a weak or slow-burning fire.

[crowleycrow]

Well of course your analysis is correct. But mine is funnier. If you get "lit a fire under" in any proximity to "wall paper" and "historic house" and then double down by taking the metaphor a step farther, you get an irresistible mental tug to mix them, even if the metaphor's correct. (Fowler's examples all tend to mix one dead metaphor with a live one, which causes the dead one to awaken: "We must first sift the evidence with laser-like attention" makes "sift" produce its original meaning, having to do with flour, and sifting is not done with lasers, thus comic collision.)