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More Metaphoricals

My metaphor Bank.


Avoiding Cliche

It's not like the devil-kids on the bus were going to wake up on the other side of their beds tomorrow. (Eleanor & Park, Rowell, page 11)
That's seriously mixed up, but it does work. This is more straightforward. He has started to wear eyeliner; he dad hates it and isn't speaking to him.
Park wondered if it was just the eyeliner that had done it -- or if the eyeliner had been the pencil that broke the camel's back. (Eleanor & Park, Rowell, page 228)



Great Lexaphor
"He's trying to make peace, Eleanor. You promised that you'd try, too."
"It's easier for me to make peace from a distance."
I told him you were ready to be part of this family."
"I'm already part of this family. I'm like a charter member."
(Eleanor & Park, page 11)

This is the modern teenager use of like, not making a simile. Interesting, it does function as both.

Best Line Ever?

She does not get along well with her father, who she rarely sees but is picking her up from school.

"All right," he said, backing out of the parking space too fast. She'd forgotten what a crappy driver he was. He did everything too fast and one-handed. (Eleanor & Park, Rowell, page 97)

Everything turns this into a metaphor. Perhaps even an explicit synecdoche. I guess this would be normal for a Chandler detective story. It popped out from a Y/A book.

Reality and metaphor are mixed. He doesn't do everything in real life one-handed, he does everything in real life with the style and attitude of driving one-handed.

Modern A filter catches emails with words on a "red flag" list.

That last one, "Classified," beached the entire network... (Attachment, Rowell, page 11)

That's a lexaphor for a beached whale.

This next simile is set up. They are exchanging emails.

Beth: There's a cute guy working here
Jennifer: No, there isn't.
Beth: I know, that was my first response, too.

And two pages later we read:

Beth: Do you think its scandalous that someone in a committed relationship like mine is checking out guys at the drinking fountain?
Jennifer: No. How could you not notice a cute guy around here? That's like spotting a passenger pigeon.
(Attachment, Rowell, page 78)

I'm not even sure what counts as modern. It's almost like our metaphors are stuck in 17th England. The quick fox. The wise owl. A stich in time saves nine. Speaking about New Year's of the year 2000:

New Year's is my favorite holiday. And this is the biggest New Year's ever."
"But it's a nothing holiday, Christine. It's an odometer turning over."

Odometers have to be at least 80 years old. But they are a part of modern life.

Rowell is the best author I know of for using modern metaphors. They aren't new new, but they're original. It's like she does think about how she can use things as metaphors. Someone who is not joining in at a party:

So he stood by the fence with the cheapest beer avilable and deadbolted his jaw into place. (Landline, page 71)
She closed the washing machine lid, set the dial to GENTLE, then sak down on the floor in front of the dryer and leaned against it. It was warm and humming, and Georgie felt like one of those rhesus mankeys who preferred the cloth mother. (Landline, page 197)

Allusion/Avoiding the Familiar

She had just found out that the man she loved wasn't interested in marrying her, and she is getting advice from her friends.

"He'll get in touch again," said Lotta, "Bt make sure you tie yourself to the mast and cover your ears." (Acts of Infidelity, Andersson, page 23)
It is possible for a metaphor to become an idiom. For example, we can make metaphors with, to pick a random thing, DNA. But, really, they could use different features of DNA. The people making a dictionary could try to put one of the metaphorical meanings into the dictionary, but that would be pointless. (They might do it anyway.) First, there was no reason to do that -- of course DNA (or anything) can be used as a metaphor. That should go without saying. And there's no reason to include one metaphorical meaning over another.

The story is different when the metaphor becomes an idiom (or even a word or word phrase). For one, people might not be even aware of the metaphor (Ella was inclined to drive.) More importantly for our purposes, the meaning of the phrase might transcend the metaphor.

For example, putting a newspaper to bed was, presumably, at first a metaphor. But it came to have a meaning of its own. And perhaps it could even be used as a metaphor, though I am not sure that happens for putting something to bed.

So, anyway, there is a phrase money laundering. What happens is that the origin of the money is illegal. So the money is given to someone (or something) else, and then the money is given to the intended recipient. So the origin of the money is essentially washed away or cleaned off. (The money itself is not cleaned.)

This is well enough known that it can be used as a metaphor. So, in one situation, as the story went, Rudy Giuliani wanted to provide dirt on someone. Dirt itself is a metaphor, for information that will attack the person, metaphorically making them dirty. But what if Giuliani didn't want to be known as the person providing the information? That might, among other possibilities, make the information seem less reliable. So Giuliani might give the information to someone else, and the second person might introduce the information into public discourse. Then the origin of the dirt is stripped away.

And it was written:

In his work, he [Solomon] effectively laundered dirt provided to him by Donald Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, producing articles that...
(Vox, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/11/19/20971075/rudy-giuliani-john-solomon-ukraine-impeachment-trump)

Anyway, there you have it: Laundering dirt. It's a mixed metaphor; those don't fit together literally to make the correct meaning; it in a way breaks the rule of not having two metaphors in the same sentence. I'm guessing the author didn't realize dirt was a metaphor, and the author probably didn't think of laundering as a metaphor either, it just had the same meaning as in laundering money.

A Curiosity

It's just . . . In the following, count how many words you don't know the meaning of. Doesn't Shake & Bake seem out of place? I loved it.
In the MAD phasing process, we finally succeeded in locating 48 (out of 60) crystallographically independent selenium sites by the ‘Shake & Bake’ approach to direct methods (Weeks and Miller, 1999), without recourse to heavy atom derivatives or other methods of phasing (see Materials and methods)
(Anand et al., EMBO J. 2002 Jul 1; 21(13): 3213–3224)