Mixed Metaphors

Their Use and Abuse

Karen Sullivan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350066052
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Critics shudder at mixed metaphors like 'that wet blanket is a loose cannon', but admire 'Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player', and all the metaphors packed into Macbeth's 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow' speech. How is it that metaphors are sometimes mixed so badly and other times put together so well? In Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse, Karen Sullivan employs findings from linguistics and cognitive science to explore how metaphors are combined and why they sometimes mix. Once we understand the ways that metaphoric ideas are put together, we can appreciate why metaphor combinations have such a wide range of effects. Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse includes analyses of over a hundred metaphors from politicians, sportspeople, writers and other public figures, and identifies the characteristics that make these metaphors annoying, amusing or astounding.

1 PERFECT MIX OR PERFECT MESS?

Lightning pirouetted like a drunken ballerina across purpling clouds and a sky the colour of regret.¹

What makes the ‘ballerina’ sentence painful to read? Its spelling, grammar, and punctuation are flawless, yet the passage is awkward, unconvincing, and would have no place in a literary classic (though it did manage to be published in a contemporary novel).

The problem with the sentence is its metaphors. First of all, lightning moves in straight or jagged lines and cannot ‘pirouette’. Second, most of us haven’t had the privilege of seeing a ballet dancer perform while drunk, so we may have trouble imagining what this looks like. Finally, we have no way of knowing whether the colour of ‘regret’ is green, grey, black, or orange. The pirouetting lightning, the ballerina, and the regret-coloured sky make the passage hard to understand.

Compare the ‘ballerina’ passage with a metaphoric phrase from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence:

Another old shop whose small window looked like a cunning, half-shut eye.²

We’ve all seen a half-shut eye and can easily compare this image to the half-closed window of a shop. The shopfront can be understood as a face, and the ‘cunning’ expression of the eye hints at a secretive, ominous attitude. We immediately suspect that the shop is old and mysterious. Each word in the metaphor conveys imagery and emotional impact.

Both the ‘ballerina’ and the ‘half-shut eye’ metaphors have the form of similes. That is, they introduce metaphoric comparisons with the word like, as in more familiar similes such as her cheeks are like roses or we’re like two peas in a pod. However, labelling these examples as similes doesn’t help explain why many critics would be horrified by the ‘ballerina’ example but delighted by the ‘half-shut eye’. The examples are metaphoric similes because they include the word like. If like is removed and a drunken ballerina is instead offset with commas, in the first example, and looked like is replaced with was in the second example, the two passages are no longer similes. Removing like or looked like is also a useful exercise because it shows that these words have a relatively small effect on how the metaphors are understood.³ If these words are changed, the ‘ballerina’ passage is still confusing and the ‘half-shut eye’ description is still expressive.

In general, the specific words in metaphoric language are less important than the concepts that the metaphors are comparing. Critics often pay attention to metaphoric words instead of concepts, simply because words are easier to identify. It’s straightforward to decide that a metaphor includes the word like and therefore is a simile. It’s harder to pinpoint what’s wrong with lightning that pirouettes or what’s interesting about a window that resembles an eye.

Even though metaphoric words are easier to study, metaphoric concepts tell us much more about how metaphors work. Every metaphor has conceptual structure that hides certain facts and forces others to our attention.⁴ Well-chosen metaphors help us imagine people who never lived and events that never happened. Metaphors let us think about black holes, authoritarianism, death, and thousands of other things we can’t see or touch.

We could say that metaphors allow us to ‘grasp’ otherwise nameless notions, ‘tackle’ difficult problems, and ‘move forward’ in our understanding of the world. Language is ‘full’ of metaphors once we ‘open our eyes’. Yet metaphors are almost imperceptible unless something brings them to our attention. For the most part, we notice metaphors only when they go wrong or when they seem so exceptional that we marvel at what they can do.

English speakers often know intuitively that there’s something amiss with a metaphor, like those in the ‘ballerina’ passage, but can’t pinpoint the problem. Many English speakers are happy to call these ‘mixed metaphors’ even if they can’t tell exactly what’s wrong with them.⁵ Most linguists, on the other hand, define mixed metaphor more narrowly. They tend to consider a metaphor mixed only if it combines, or ‘mixes’, two different, incompatible metaphors.⁶ Rugby coach Craig Bellamy produced a mixed metaphor of this strictly defined type when he complained about a colleague, ‘He’s gone behind my back, right in front of my face!’ Nobody could be behind Bellamy (as in the first metaphor) and also in front of him (as in the second metaphor), so these two metaphors are contradictory and are ‘mixed’ in every sense of the term.

For most English speakers, though, the definition of mixed metaphors has been extended to encompass individual metaphors that are simply hard to imagine, like a drunken ballerina, and those that are internally inconsistent, like spinning lightning. These mixed metaphors cause as much trouble as the more traditional kind, so they’ll be included in this book along with the metaphors that linguists usually consider mixed.

Human intuitions about metaphors are not limited to whether or not metaphors are mixed. As human beings, we have the ability to use and understand metaphoric language without conscious awareness of the metaphoric concepts involved. There are nevertheless advantages to making ourselves consciously aware of the metaphors around us. If we know how metaphors work on a conceptual level, we can control their effects. We can avoid using metaphors that are confusing or distracting, and we can design metaphors that do exactly what we want. When we encounter metaphoric language, we can analyse what makes it effective or not. We can avoid being manipulated by subconscious metaphors, and we can accept the benefits of a metaphor while rejecting any aspects we find unhelpful or inaccurate.

It’s only recently that the conceptual underpinnings of metaphoric language have been recognized at all. From Aristotle’s time until the last decades of the twentieth century, metaphor was generally considered a poetic embellishment rather than an essential part of everyday cognition. In 1980, the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a book that changed how many people think about metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson showed that metaphor pervades all language use, not just poetry or literature. Most metaphors, they argued, are so effortless and natural that we use them all the time without noticing. We don’t usually think of everyday sentences such as I’m planning ahead as metaphoric. However, it’s apparent that the word ahead is not strictly literal in this sentence, because the future that we’re planning for isn’t physically ahead of us. Lakoff and Johnson argue that examples such as I’m planning ahead are metaphoric, even though they’re less noticeable than some of the clever, original metaphors found in poetry. Today, there is disagreement over which words and phrases should be considered metaphoric,⁷ but even conservative metaphor researchers agree that metaphors occur in everyday language as well as literary language.

Lakoff and Johnson also found that metaphor is anything but superficial embellishment. Metaphors are primarily ways of thinking, not ways of speaking. When we use metaphoric language, it activates complex cognitive (i.e. thought-based) structures called conceptual metaphors. This is what gives metaphoric language its power. For instance, when we say that we ‘see’ what someone means, that their meaning is ‘clear’ to us, or that their explanation ‘sheds light’ on a topic, we use words and phrases related to vision, such as see, clear, or shed light, to talk about the comprehension of ideas. According to Lakoff and Johnson, we use words related to vision because we actually think about comprehension in terms of vision. The concepts of vision and comprehension are cognitively connected. The next chapter introduces further evidence for conceptual associations of this kind and describes how these connections affect human language and thought.

If metaphors are conceptual structures, this helps explain why they are sometimes used in ways that can seem confusing or awkward, such as in mixed metaphors. Conceptual metaphors, according to Lakoff and Johnson, are mostly subconscious and unintentional. Since we’re not consciously aware of most of our metaphors, we sometimes use them in ways that won’t make sense to other people. We might, for example, say that we ‘see’ what someone is saying, ‘see’ that a dog is smelly and needs a bath, or otherwise claim to ‘see’ attributes that are actually perceived by other senses. Usually, audiences will understand even an imperfect metaphor.⁸ Our listeners won’t be confused if we say we ‘see’ that a fabric feels soft or ‘see’ how a concerto is structured. Using this wording does, however, suggest that we’re not paying attention to our choice of metaphors, and it may distract a listener from the point we’re trying to make.

This book employs research from linguistics and cognitive science to explore why some metaphors seem confusing or peculiar, whereas others are memorable and marvellous. The absurd examples are usually produced by speakers and authors who are apparently unaware of the metaphors they’re using, as in the ‘drunken ballerina’ passage. The more meaningful examples come from people who consciously and skilfully craft their metaphors, as in the ‘half-shut eye’ quotation. Finally, some mixed metaphors are used by people who are aware of their metaphors but pretend not to be, for devious reasons of their own.

This last class of metaphors is in many ways the most revealing because it shows how metaphors can be pushed to their limits. Skill with metaphors doesn’t always mean making them effortless for the reader.⁹ Certain speakers and authors like to challenge their readers with unusual metaphor combinations, which can make language memorable, effective, and often humorous. When classical guitarist Andrés Segovia describes the piano as ‘a monster that screams when you touch its teeth’, this evocative combination of metaphors wouldn’t normally be considered mixed. Even though the toothy image and the sound of screaming come from two different metaphors (specifically, two image metaphors, which are discussed in the next chapter), with a little imagination we can visualize a toothy monster screaming, and Segovia’s delightful description is worth the effort this takes.

Other skilled speakers and writers use the power of metaphor for more nefarious ends. That is, they intentionally mangle their idioms and metaphors to create malicious humour, such as when Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards described US presidential nominee George H. W. Bush as ‘born with a silver foot in his mouth’. Richards intentionally mixed metaphors by combining the idioms born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth ‘be born wealthy and privileged’ and put one’s foot in one’s mouth ‘misspeak’, in order to suggest that Bush was both privileged and prone to speech errors. By presenting her comment in the guise of a speech error itself (specifically, a malaphor; see Chapter 6), Richards mocked Bush’s own speech errors and added humour to make the insult more memorable.

About 150 years before Richards, another US politician, Congressman John Randolph, made a clever metaphoric criticism of his colleague Senator Edward Livingston:

He is as a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.¹⁰

A great politician might metaphorically be said to ‘shine’, and a corrupt one could metaphorically ‘stink’. These metaphoric uses of shine and stink involve conceptual metaphors that are traditionally called GOODNESS IS LIGHT and MORALITY IS PURITY (metaphor naming conventions ...