Bad metaphors

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Let’s deconstruct bad metaphors/similes/aphorisms/etc in three steps

  1. Find a bad metaphor and describe it’s failure

Mine: “You’ve made your bed and now you have to lie in it.”

Bad for two reasons - because “making a bed” is easily confused with tidying the sheets, which is something you do after you lie in a bed, not before it, and also because it’s kind of negative, implying that if you’ve made a mistake there is nothing to do besides accept the consequences

  1. Fix it!

“You’ve spilled your spaghetti, now you’ve got to spic and span.”

Better because there’s no ambiguity in spilling your spaghetti, and because it implies that the proper behavior is not to simply accept the consequences of your mistakes, but that you should try and make amends of some sort.

If you really want to emphasize the consequences aspect, there is already the superior

“You reap what you sow” which implies that the consequences can be either negative or positive, depending on what your initial actions are.

  1. Optional: anecdotal mistaken metaphors

Once when I was a kid and wet the bed, my parent told me to “wake up and smell the wool”…

2

*“Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity.”
*— Percy Bysshe Shelley

When I was in art school my color-theory instructor had us illustrate that quote. The entire class responded with a collective *“WTF???”
*

3

As an art teacher, I’d like to ask "Why are we letting amateurs anywhere near words?

Great accidental anecdotal metaphor: my wife, in the heat of an argument:

“Ha! NOW the foot’s on the other ankle!”

To my credit, I kept a straight face, and stayed on topic.

She does this all the time. “That’s just the needle that broke the camel’s… what? Why are you all laughing?”

4

two can live as cheaply as one

fix: but only for half as long.

5

Anything worth doing is worth doing well/Good enough for who it’s for: moving Cafe Society --> MPSIMS.

6

Sorry, thought it was a literary topic…

7

A bird in the hand is worth 2 in the bush.

Maybe it’s inflation, but I think the exchange rate between hand-birds and bush-birds should be much higher.

I would also argue that there are any number of relevant parameters which would have to be specified - distance to bush, weapons available, type of bush (density of foliage), etc.

8

Let a nerd get his hands on an innocent metaphor and the result isn’t pretty.

9

From Garth Brooks’ “Burning Bridges” :

I told her that we’d cross that bridge whenever it arrived. Now through the flames I see her standing on the other side.

So the bridge had been hanging out somewhere, but luckily made it home before someone set it on fire…or something.