CSotD: Prisoners of our own literary device
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There was a standup I have otherwise forgotten except for one bit, in which he took a roll of aluminum foil, tore off a sheet, wadded it up and then put it in his mouth and chewed on it while the audience writhed in horror.
Which came to mind as I read today's Dustin.
I leave it to people who care way too much about definitions to say if that is a simile, but I didn't use "like" and I also didn't say "compare" and so perhaps it's not. Or perhaps it is. Perhaps I care. We'll get back to that.
Meanwhile, either this is National Metaphor and Idiom Day or Dustin made me more aware of how often it comes up. Consider:
… Dogs of C-Kennel, in which characters take literally an expression I understand is often misheard as "it's a doggy-dog world."
I'm not even sure what a "doggy-dog world" would be like, except that it would include a lot of butt-sniffing, rolling in smelly things and mad, hilarious chase games, which would be quite different from and far more fun than a "dog eat dog world."
Red and Rover touches on a proverb with some real depth, which is likely why it has lasted so long, though I'm only accepting this explanation as far back as the 14th century and not to the Book of Proverbs.
However, that brings up another mis-used idiom, which is that if you refer to something as "proverbial," it ought to hark back to a proverb.
Letting the proverbial sleeping dog lie is correct. But there is no "proverbial dog in the manger" because that was a parable, not a proverb. And I would not favor referring to the "parabalic dog in the manger" because it would take about a day-and-a-half for that to become "the parabolic dog in the manger."
BTW, when I was about Red's age, I once walked by someone's yard and said hello to a large dog who was lying asleep in the sun. Fortunately, he only chased me to the property line, but I did emerge with a greater respect for the proverb.
And Mark Parisi puts spin on a pair of proverbs or sayings or something in today's Off the Mark, a cartoon the title of which is, of course, based off of his name. (I read it on the proverbial grapevine.)
I don't think metaphors are in as much trouble as prepositions, but they're certainly endangered, and it's one thing for language to gain new meanings but quite another for it to shed all meaning.
As a reader who is also an editor, the prepositions upset me more because the very same unimaginative structuralists who insist on gutting the language of all nuance in the service of "good grammar" ought to at least be able to turn out students who know which preposition to use.
That is, if you can't embrace the irony of folk idioms like "I could care less" or recognize a humorous Yogi-ism like "deja vu all over again," you really should turn your literalism to some benefit by teaching structure.
Granted, the world-widiness of the WWW is throwing either a wrench or a spanner into things, depending on from whence it is thrown, but some of that is self-correcting: It's not hard to figure out that, while New Yorkers wait on the lines everyone else in America waits in, and New Yorkers love to affect British usage, this can't be a Britishism because, in England, you wait in a queue.
The problem with mixed, misplaced and mangled metaphors (that was alliteration, something not — horrors! – to be mistaken for assonance) is that you can't interrupt someone to make some petty usage correction without being something of an ass, which is to say that, if you respond, "I agree with your point, though I'm not sure red flags actually 'go off' …" you're, at best, a condescending ass, while, if you actually halt things to explain the error, you are a complete and utter ass.
And so you think, "I should probably say something later," but you probably won't, because it's not that important in the grand scheme of things and so then later on it will pop up in yet another conversation and it still won't be either on topic or kind to point it out.
Editors, on the other hand, are supposed to bring the caravan to a halt. Good editors do this without crushing their writers, but they all must do it.
For example, my current bête noire is writing that something is "based off of" rather than "based on" something else.
This is not a regionalism or a Britishism. It is simply wrong, and growing.
It's turning up in my kids' copy so often and so consistently that I created a visual for them showing why nothing could possibly be "based off of" anything.
These are brilliant, gifted writers from a variety of schools, and for "based off of" to suddenly be popping up repeatedly in their work, the most charitable explanation is that their classroom teachers are failing to correct the error. Which isn't all that charitable, since it means they aren't teaching.
I hope I'm wrong, but I'm not encouraged by reports from the Front about what teachers of English are required to teach.
Which brings us to:
These strips are from an old Mr. Fitz story arc, but he re-ran it on his Facebook page yesterday because he's a real teacher and is currently teaching the real (required) unit upon which (not "off of which") this sad, sad commentary is based.
So many places I could go with this, but I've reached my self-allotted word count, so I'll suggest you go see what Mr. Fitz has among his links for disspirited teachers trapped in this objectively-based standardized hell, and especially this.
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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