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Inharmonious Metaphoricals
I'm left with the small cut of him leaving me standing in the middle of the dance floor like a discarded candy wrapper.
She was dancing with a man she didn't know, she didn't want to be dancing with him, and then he just left her. Then you read the above.
What do you think of it?
Except for this website, there really isn't a lot of good advice about writing metaphoricals. But you have almost certainly read somewhere, "Don't mix your metaphors." This advice is then accompanied by humorous examples where that's an obvious problem. (Ironically, perhaps, the examples can be similes.)
My example is a lot more subtle, right? Cut is a lexaphor. (It's on the path to being a word, but it's still lexaphorical.) It doesn't have a big conflict with discarded candy wrapper – there are no silly images produced by the two together.
But they don't fit together, not in the way two metaphoricals in the same sentence admirably should. Whether this is "true" mixed metaphor or not (I don't care), I rate the sentence as improved by eliminating the first metaphorical:
I'm left with the small insult of him leaving me standing in the middle of the dance floor like a discarded candy wrapper.
If the candy wrapper metaphor hadn't been there, I prefer cut over insult; cut is more vivid, insult too abstract for me.
I'm still thinking about this issue. It's illogical to call that a mixed metaphor; it's only one example; I don't know how well it generalizes. I hope to have a better idea in the future. But my path to a better sentence was seeing the metaphoricals as not fitting together.
For now:
Check once before using two metaphoricals that do not fit together.
Perhaps even more subtle:
Like there's a blizzard of information, drifts of it just waiting for people who are up to no good to come out and shovel through. (Walt, Wangersky, page 61 trade)
Those three metaphoricals all fit a snow theme. But the information is first a blizzard, then the information is a drift. Awkward -- how can information be both a blizzard and a drift? Perhaps:
Like there's a blizzard of information, piling up into deep drifts, waiting for ...
That version makes sense; the original jumps in a way that creates a clash.
Taking my own advice:
#1. That second paragraph deflates like a balloon with a pinhole if the two adverbs are taken out. (original)
#2. That second paragraph deflates like a balloon with two pinholes if the adverbs are taken out. (" "An Analogy to Adverbs") Other
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