Metaphorising

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1 I always overstretch a metaphor, take the metaphorical baton and run with it just for the joy of running, brandishing the baton aloft whilst the rest of the team hang around at the starting line shifting uncomfortably and yelling 'come back with the baton, you've gone too far', but it's too late, I've left the track and have reached wide open spaces...

2 Talking to friends w/ kids lately, I've become acutely aware that modern liberal parenting involves non-euphemistic and single words for genitalia. There will be no tuppences or pee pees, only fannies and penises. When I idly suggested that applying this reasoning to other areas of life would be kind of dull, not to mention philosophically untenable in this hyper-Derridean society that shows every sign of worsening, I got stony silence.

3 Die Grunen used to refer to their '2 leg' approach: one leg moving through parliamentary institutions, the other firmly planted in grass roots movements and radical philosophy. This seems like a safe way of ensuring that you fall over.

Talk to me about metaphors, especially the appropriateness or otherwise of ones for genitals, and stupid metaphors as intrinsically flawed as 'two legs'.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 12:04 (twenty-three years ago)

i like metaphors but my poetry lately has been all facts.

― anthony easton (anthony), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 14:46 (twenty-three years ago)

1. Overstretching the metaphor winds up turning it into an analogy -- or in extremis an allegory. This is a big problem because people don't understand how analogies are supposed to illustrate a phenomenon, not actually correspond to one. You say something is "a bit like riding a bicycle" and they tell you your argument is completely flawed because if the bicycle has a coasting brake then it's not that way at all. So just don't do it in argument form.

2. I've concluded that the best of all possible situations is to get child-genital words from a different language. For lots of different reasons.

3. Following with the over-literalism of point one, Ellie: actually so long as that grass-roots foot is "firmly planted," then the other one can stomp around quite a bit without anything falling over.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 14:49 (twenty-three years ago)

Oh that's the example of point one I was looking for: "Oh no that doesn't make sense Ellie because with a baton there's an expectation of handing it off to another person whereas with metaphor it's blah blah blah."

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 14:50 (twenty-three years ago)

My great interest is in people using the word "literally" to mean "not literally" or "figuratively". Some football examples: X "is literally playing out of his skin tonight," or Y "is literally flying down the wing" or Z (=Ryan Giggs in fact) "literally has no right foot." The best ever example was in 'Edward On Edward', a TV show narrated by our present Prince Edward on the King that abdicated. Someone scripted the line that after his father died Edward "was literally catapulted onto the throne," a practice that I'd like to see retained for future coronations.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:03 (twenty-three years ago)

I once wrote a two-page letter to a new friend (pen pal) in which I mentioned standing still like a statue of a lizard. I then went on to detail this imaginary statue, including a full history, described people gazing at it in wonder, etc. etc. I finsihed without even stating my original point. Needless to say he never wrote back to me.

― Lek Dukagjin, Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:10 (twenty-three years ago)

Martin: I used to hate that one but now I find it somewhat charming. I mean, it's basically metaphor inflation, isn't it? "Catapulted onto the throne" seems so non-metaphorical -- just standard copywriter's form. But while saying "literally catapulted" really means the same thing as saying "catapulted" -- both just mean "catapulted," in the end -- putting in the "literally" says "no this is not a metaphor" and consequently makes it even more of a metaphor, and in this hyperbolic blatant-lie kind of way that I find amusing.

Obviously a better practice would be if people just tried harder to come up with metaphors what were new enough to still strike us as metaphors in the first place. Or didn't use metaphors as quite so much of a reflex, only employing the ones we actually wanted people to imagine or think about.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:23 (twenty-three years ago)

Nabisco: but it can't go very far.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:23 (twenty-three years ago)

And the baton was the conversation, obv.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:25 (twenty-three years ago)

I think what I mean is that adding "literally" can occasionally turn it from a passing rhetorical figure to a poetic metaphor. "He has no right foot" = oh, he's weak with his right foot, very businesslike. "He literally has no right foot" = you get to imagine him hobbling and flailing everywhere, which is a lot prettier.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:26 (twenty-three years ago)

And yes, it doesn't go very far unless you take it as the opening volley in a war of metaphorical inflation, the end of which would be the deadpan announcer doing a whole 15-minute story on how the right foot was eaten off by wild badgers in 1974. And obviously most people who say "literally [metaphor]" are just thinking that "literally" means "really to a great degree."

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 16:28 (twenty-three years ago)

I think Nitsuh's right. Casual use of 'literally' as an intensifier yields a double delight: both the absurdity of the misuse, and the the alarming/poetic spectacle of the hobbling and flailing.

And I meant the FOOT that was moving through the institutions couldn't go very far from the OTHER FOOT that was in the grass roots etc... WHICH IS THE POINT! What a damn fine metaphor.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 17:25 (twenty-three years ago)

I don't know why Nitsuh and Ellie are describing all this as if they are in opposition to what I think. What made you think this? I love these bizarre uses of the word, which is why I sort of collect them.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 17:28 (twenty-three years ago)

Sorry MArtin! Making up arguments to think harder is all.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 17:42 (twenty-three years ago)

No, I like threads where no one can tell whether they agree or not. So in that spirit: Ellie I imagined the two-legged institution in question to be huge, an immense collosus with one foot in an ant-covered map-portion reading "grass roots" and the other in a metropolitan area (with little plastic buildings embedded) reading "institutions." It would make sense for them to imagine themselves the same way. And there's the added metaphor that as the grass roots and the institutions grew apart, they would be forced to either (a) grow even larger, or (b) rip their pants at the crotch, pull a groin muscle, and then topple calamitously over.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 18:23 (twenty-three years ago)

This thread is ridiculous.

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 18:25 (twenty-three years ago)

So anyway Ellie what is your position on genital euphemisms? And what of the transition from euphemism to proper usage? Now that I'm thinking about it, it doesn't seem like a horrible idea, because it means that (a) at some age, the child sort of claims his/her genitals to him/herself, and the parents cede their involvement, and (b) this point is announced by the hilarious sound of pissy embarrassed teens saying "Jesus, mom, stop calling it that!" [Cue: stomping on stairs, door slamming, loud blaring of Breaking Benjamin's "Polyamorous."]

― nabisco (nabisco), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 18:39 (twenty-three years ago)

In re sex bits, I suppose the general point is the rather dull one that people try to avoid euphemisms in relation to things and experiences where there's traditionally coyness and evasion and historically it's fucked people up. Especially women. My friend B is fiercely political/feminist and her main concern is that her son has an extensive vocabulary for his penis whilst unless she intervenes decisively Rosy is left with a verbal/textual lack. Or something. Probably just an excess of Lacan in the intellectual diet. And that's tied in with a wider aversion to baby-talk for some groups, ostensibly on the grounds that it's patronising, I suppose, or doesn't help baby develop; though I wonder if maybe it's as much because of embarrassment at the polymorphous perversity of mouth sounds, maybe especially for people who trade in words in some way.

Anyway, all that stuff is likely very sensible and important, because being able to speak plainly about potentially complex and troubling things matters, and simultaneously just utterly, utterly pointless because language is so unstoppably irrepressibly metaphorical. I don't mean so much to do with conversational and literary usage, I mean bedded down into the ordinary words and phrases that we don't even see (look! there's one; and 'look'! another) as metaphorical. (I suppose I'm using 'metaphor' inaccurately to refer to all figures of speech and the idea of signification more generally). And because presumably the adolescent strop is the more important part of the equation anyway.

PS I imagined the huge giant greenparty person and the tiny buildings too, excepct with the other foot in actual grass.

― Ellie (Ellie), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 20:55 (twenty-three years ago)

Literallly rediculous?

― Graham (graham), Wednesday, 28 August 2002 21:11 (twenty-three years ago)

You two!

― felicity (felicity), Thursday, 29 August 2002 02:27 (twenty-three years ago)

is this thread about wangs?

― Josh (Josh), Thursday, 29 August 2002 02:57 (twenty-three years ago)

seven months pass...

"More than a match for many contemporary paintings, the best of these fabrics — such as [names withheld to frustrate google] — literally jumped off the wall."

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 17 April 2003 11:27 (twenty-three years ago)

Can we send an ilx search party out for Ellie? I miss her contributions. :(

― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Thursday, 17 April 2003 11:31 (twenty-three years ago)

yes come back ellie!!

the review that brought you that literally uses all of the following metaphors in the next par btw: "set the ball rolling", "viewed in the flesh" (of a headscarf) and "the colours really sang out"

― mark s (mark s), Thursday, 17 April 2003 12:29 (twenty-three years ago)

My sides are literally splitting.

― Martin Skidmore (Martin Skidmore), Thursday, 17 April 2003 17:17 (twenty-three years ago)

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