How to Block a Metaphor

The old “class warfare” metaphor is in the news and blogosphere again, thanks to Newt Gingrich’s $250,000 Tiffany’s bill. Republicans use it every time Democrats use the “T” word. (Taxes, that is. Not tea.) Now we’re hearing Dems use it to express ire over rich folks’ Tiffany bills.

The only thing worse than the class warfare metaphor is the number of people who fall for it. So we propose an exercise as a cure.

Write down some random nouns. Choose one. Now swap it for a political metaphor. Suppose your chosen word is carrot.  

Politician: The Democrats are waging class warfare.

You: The Democrats are really waging a class carrot. 

Now try to justify your strange choice. Some people may not like carrots, but they’re good for us. You have to uproot things to get a carrot. Taxes are like carrot seeds—their goodness is hidden at first. And so on. Now, what if your word was planet? Or box-top? Or gumboil?

So what’s the point of this exercise? To show how easily justified—and equally silly—most political metaphors are. Imposing taxes on the rich are indeed like waging war, in small, trivial respects. But the policy is equally like a carrot. Or a box-top. And not like any of these things.

Every kid should be taught this inoculation technique. It’ll lead to a less gullible electorate.

A Trope You Can Throw

If you’re old enough to remember the Pet Rock craze, then you have had an important lesson in the literal value of a trope. Personfication is a trope because it represents non-literal language: not literally true, but not a lie, either. Tropes play pretend; and what plays pretend better than a Pet Rock?

Pet Rocks were the brain, um, child of a California ad exec named Gary Dahl who came up with the idea in 1975. Each rock sold for $3.95, complete with a box (it had air holes so the rock could breathe), straw, and a thirty-two-page manual with instructions on teaching the rock such tricks as “stay,” “sit,” and, with an assist by the owner, “attack.” The fad lasted half a year; Santa brought us one for Christmas and we set it free in the backyard.

Dahl used his profits to open a bar, which he ironically named after the anti-alcohol crusader Carrie Nation. Leave it to an advertising man to make a fortune out of tropes. 

How to Paradoxify a Character

We’ve been dwelling on paradoxical tropes over the past few posts.  Today, let’s get personal.

When you want to describe any person memorably, toss in bad and good ingredients of their personality and let them have at it. This is especially true of someone you dislike. Watch the difference between a 100-percent evil description and one that’s a little more ambiguous. 

Evil: She had a thin, quick, mean look about her—scary-looking even when she smiled, which was rare. 

Ambiguous: She was lithe and smart and quick as a whippet, with the rare smile that a whippet makes just before it bites. 

The Evil version is conversational, descriptive, and blandly unmemorable. The second version condemns the victim to an infamous eternity by starting out pleasantly—creating tension.

Frederic William Henry Myers mixed used paradox to describe St. Paul. 

Coldly sublime,

intolerably just.

 The line makes us shiver. Whether you think Myers is playing fair or not, the technique is flawless: bad paired with good in each balanced phrase. You don’t have to be nearly as literary to be memorable. Just think of a way to balance the good and bad side of every trait.

Paradoxical Movie Stars

The term paradox comes from the Greek, para, meaning “opposite” or “contrary to”; and doxa, meaning “belief.” You see doxa in “orthodoxy,” which literally means “correct belief.” A paradox takes a pair of truths and mashes them together like positive and negative ions in a nuclear experiment. The opposites can be attractive, helping your audience understand complexity while holding their attention.

Contradictions come up a lot when we describe people. Just look at reasonable key words for famous people. The terms frequently contradict all on their own. 

Lindsay Lohan: Beautiful, funny, screw-loose drunken nutcase.

Sarah Palin: Fit, savvy, tough, funny, vicious.

George Clooney: Handsome, suave, monotonal

Mel Gibson: Handsome, funny, racist drunken nutcase. 

Now: Can you paradoxify a friend—or, better, an enemy?

Oxymore, Not Less

The ancient Greeks, those witty chaps, made their term for an oxymoron…an oxymoron! The word means “sharp dullness”—referring to “cleverly stupid,” not “old knife that can give you tetanus.”

That etymology helps us understand why bipartisanship fails in Congress these days. In a democracy, “partisanship” means “along party lines.” As in, “I’m voting for this even though it doesn’t make any sense, simply because I’m a (circle one) Democrat/Republican.” “Bi,” when not used by adolescent males, means “two.” Put them together and the meaning becomes, “People who detest each other singing ‘Kumbaya’ for the cameras.” When people go beyond party lines and actually accomplish something—I’m old enough to remember when that actually happened in Washington—the effort is not bipartisan but nonpartisan. The oxymoron makes for a nice parlor game, the winner being the person who comes up with the most apt one.

Airline food

Military intelligence (Groucho Marx coined this one, of course.)

Open secret

Microsoft Works

Free love

Jumbo shrimp

Pretty ugly

Undeclared voter

Continental breakfast (hardly continent-sized)

Compassionate conservative

Pragmatic idealist

You may see some stereotype flipping here: Microsoft is infamous for its klugey software. To consider “free love” an oxymoron, you have to think of love in typically cynical terms. The oxymoron often flips stereotypes. You can, too, by listening for terms that contradict commonly accepted notions of a subject.

Why You Should Teach Four -Letter Words to a Kid

One of the pleasures of adulthood is the opportunity to shock our juniors. I found myself with an especially good opportunity years ago, when my daughter, Dorothy Jr., was five. My wife and kids had joined me for dinner at Dartmouth College’s Moosilauke Ravine Lodge, a giant log cabin where incoming freshmen were given a feast. Dorothy Jr. sat next to me on a long bench, and a freshman sat on her other side. The boy looked really hungry, and for good reason: he had spent two nights camping in the woods and eating badly cooked food as part of his college orientation. Starvation must have made him clumsy or greedy; when he tried to raise a large drumstick of barbecued chicken to his mouth the thing slipped from his hand and dropped onto his lap. Exclaiming the F-word, he picked the chicken off his sauce-covered pants and then glanced guiltily over at Dorothy Jr. My little blond, pigtailed girl was watching his face with interest.

“Oh,” the boy said to me. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Dorothy, explain to the gentleman what you know about that word.”

“It was originally a term that meant plowing,” Dorothy Jr. said.

“Oh.” He held his chicken uncertainly.

“I know a lot of words,” she explained. “Would you like to hear about some others?” She listed several more four-letter words and offered to give the etymology of each one.

By now most of the table was staring at Dorothy Jr. The freshman looked across her at me. “Dude!” he laughed nervously.

Even better than shocking our juniors is using our own children to shock our juniors. “She’s interested in words,” I shrugged. “All kinds.”

I didn’t explain that Dorothy Jr.’s erudition was part of an experiment of mine to see whether knowledge of taboo words could erase their black magic and make them merely enjoyable. If my kids learned the story of individual “foul” words, would they seem so foul when it came time to use them? I had assured my skeptical wife that the words would probably lose their charm; without magic, why cuss? It’s the taboo that makes blue language work. But my secret hope was that my kids would grow up into imaginative employers of four-letter words.

And boy, did they. Not to brag or anything, but at twenty-six my daughter talks like a sailor—a very articulate sailor. I love that she appreciates “bad” words for what they can do to add spice or shock or express rage. Oh, she can be offended; she hates four-letter words when they’re used for no real purpose, or when they’re hurled at people simply to upset them. I like to think that she speaks a lighter shade of blue. 

Want your kid to love language? Teach her to love all of it, including the juicy parts.