Thanks, Jude. I enjoyed your post. Yes, mixed metaphors are widely and consistently reviled in writing circles, but I find them interesting too, and often amusing.
A friend on Twitter brought a passage by Nietzsche to my attention, one that might have inspired Jaynes’s line:
“Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
[…] thought of as similes, analogies and so on, but single words can be metaphorical too. In “Depending on metaphor”, I point out that although the current use of depend is chiefly abstract, its original meaning […]
Thank you for the reference to Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis. It brings to mind the debate between Catholics and Protestants regarding the sacrament of the Eucharist. Is the bread literally the body of Christ? For Catholics, the metaphor of the bread is or becomes real. For Protestants, this metaphor is merely symbolic. This debate within the Christian community about transubstantiation is at the heart a debate about metaphors.
Transubstantiation is a good example, Doré, and the debate you mention is one I used to mull over in my youth. It was (pun unintended) a hard one to swallow.
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Interesting. I recently wrote about mixed metaphors and idiom blends, which we’re told are wrong, even though Shakespeare used them…
http://www.write-well.co.uk/2011/03/05/charlie-sheens-genius-for-mixed-metaphor/
Thanks, Jude. I enjoyed your post. Yes, mixed metaphors are widely and consistently reviled in writing circles, but I find them interesting too, and often amusing.
A friend on Twitter brought a passage by Nietzsche to my attention, one that might have inspired Jaynes’s line:
“Truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.”
[…] thought of as similes, analogies and so on, but single words can be metaphorical too. In “Depending on metaphor”, I point out that although the current use of depend is chiefly abstract, its original meaning […]
Thank you for the reference to Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis. It brings to mind the debate between Catholics and Protestants regarding the sacrament of the Eucharist. Is the bread literally the body of Christ? For Catholics, the metaphor of the bread is or becomes real. For Protestants, this metaphor is merely symbolic. This debate within the Christian community about transubstantiation is at the heart a debate about metaphors.
Transubstantiation is a good example, Doré, and the debate you mention is one I used to mull over in my youth. It was (pun unintended) a hard one to swallow.