True headline as of a few days ago, in an advert on Facebook:
Our Most Glorious Knickers Yet Have Dropped.
And I found myself thinking, "Glorious, perhaps, but couldn't they make them with stronger elastic?"
Metaphors are powerful because they are a perfect package of Show - evoke - when what you're trying to do is Tell: inform. But because they've lost the explicit "it was like" that labels a simile, and instead the comparison is only implied, it's easy to miss that a metaphor, by definition is made of something which is not physically and literally in the scene - whereas the rest of the sentence is.
One of the most common line-edits I find myself pointing out is metaphor-trouble, and it's often part of what's going on with overwriting. It usually arises when the writer isn't really thinking about the words they're putting down as an image, so they don't see it's in conflict with other images.
The obvious trouble is the obvious mixed metaphor. In each of these, there are three different images, and it rapidly gets very silly:
She unleashed a flood of propaganda which torched the board's reputation.
An army of strange bedfellows is jumping on the bandwagon.
That's awfully thin gruel for the Right to hang their hats on.
But more often it's less obvious. Let's think about Our Most Glorious Knickers Yet Have Dropped. An unscientific survey of friends suggests that "dropped" in the sense the advertisers want us to understand stems from US slang: starting with pills, evolving as the distribution of daily papers to newstands, then music singles, and then borrowed by clothing brands in the 1980s for a new product having been launched. But to some of us, the original, basic, literal meaning of the verb dropped - something falling to the ground - is sufficiently present that in combination with "knickers", it causes thoroughly Carry-On style giggles.
Linguistics usually uses I A Richards' analysis of metaphors and other figurative language: they have a "tenor", which is the thing the image is actually about, and a "vehicle", which is the image that is used to enlarge and create the full meaning and effect. So when R S Thomas writes in A Blackbird Singing about
Such rich music, as though the notes'
Ore were changed to a rare metal
At one touch of that bright bill
the tenor is the birdsong, the vehicle is the image of fine metalwork or perhaps alchemy. What is crucial is that tenor and vehicle don't clash, as literal "knickers" and metaphorical "dropped" do. So have a look at these:
A bottleneck is strangling the traffic flow.
The plane tickets have cleaned me out.
Serving roast chicken would pour oil on troubled waters.
Upstairs, innumerable bedbugs spoke of damp and poverty.
Notice how it's usually (not always) the verb whose metaphorical content is easy to miss, and so causes the clash.
But it's not only that you might make your reader giggle at the wrong moment. Look at this real example from the BBC website:
The Department for Education has just dropped the long-promised list of which schools in England are now said to have potentially unsafe RAAC concrete in their buildings.
Has the DoE abandoned the list - the more common and original metaphorical use of "dropped"? Or do they mean the more recent meaning, which is the exact opposite: that they've published the list?
Metaphors cause problems when they hide in plain sight: make sure you keep your eyes peeled.
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Photo by S. Ruvalcaba on Unsplash
