Lean in closely. Are you listening?Metaphors are not toys.
If you don't know how to handle them they can hurt you - or worse: they can make you look silly. Here's proof, from a unwitting author who shall remain nameless (because I don't know her name):
"As far as my writing career goes, this project could be the gravy on the cake."*
Oh, I hope it isn't; I do. But if she writes like that, she could find herself sitting on the bench.
Right next to Barack Obama, who said in 2008:
"Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I'm green behind the ears."
Maybe somebody should look.
Next to him will sit - however unwillingly - Sean Hannity ("That may sound great on paper") and Rush Limbaugh ("...who were going to fight you hook, line and sinker.")
Sometimes the gaffs are so glaring, you wonder - hope - they are intentional. Perhaps, you think, the speaker is making a joke:
It's as American as killing two birds with one apple pie. Gary Swing, Colorado candidate for House of Representatives
So silly, you think. You don't have to be an expert to spot a mess like that.
But be careful! Botched metaphors aren't always obvious. Because so much of our language is figurative, we forget that certain words paint pictures. Which means we'd best pay attention to what they are painting, or we could end up with something truly bizarre:
Over all, many experts conclude, advanced climate research in the United States is fragmented among an alphabet soup of agencies, strained by inadequate computing power and starved for the basic measurements of real-world conditions that are needed to improve simulations. The New York Times, 11 June 2001**
At first I thought of crackers, fragmented in the alphabet soup, and it almost worked. But then he strained the soup - so there went my crackers - and said we - or someone - was starved. Which was no surprise if he is going to go around straining the crackers out of the soup.
We must be so careful.
