“If you put a frog in a pot and slowly boil the water, the frog will sit there until it turns into Poached Kermit.”
The bad news is, this chestnut isn’t going to be going away. Wherever you have People with a Message who think the public isn’t nearly panicky enough, you will have allegorical oblivious frogs being made into soup.
The good news: a newspaper editorialist, in the middle of his amphiboid analogy, has admitted that frogs don’t actually behave like that. Yes, that’s right: a journalist from a major newspaper has actually demonstrated a rudimentary knowledge of biology.
The triumph over ignorance may be minor, but maybe, someday- call me an a crazy dreamer- we will live in a nation where, from brilliant scientists to the most humble reality TV addict, no more imaginary frogs will be boiled for our rhetoric.
(And who came up with the whole boiled frog thing, anyway? Why would someone boil a live frog in the first place? Should we call the SPCA?)