Aristotle, in The Rhetoric, describes the metaphor as the joining of dissimilars to show their similarity. He offers a number of examples from Homer, the franchise player of Greek literature, at one point noting his choice of the dawn as “rosy-fingered” as so much better than “crimson-fingered” or, worse, “red-fingered.” Metaphor, Aristotle thought, “gives style, clearness, charm, and distinction [to speech and writing] as nothing else can.” He also thought that, like the gift of a good singing voice or of swiftness afoot, metaphor-making “is not a thing whose use can be taught by one man to another.” He neglected to add that, for your jollily perverse pedant (hey, Bo, that’s me!), a really dopey metaphor can light up the sky.
I thought of Aristotle last week when two handsomely ill-constructed metaphors came my way. The first was hand-delivered by an earnest woman who said that she had read an article I had written in the New Yorker about bypass surgery and that she found it — you will have to believe me here — “heart-rending.” The second, popping up a few hours later, appeared in the pages of Beast and Man, the excellent book by the English moral philosopher Mary Midgley, who, following hard upon a discussion of the animal-behaviorist Konrad Lorenz, writes that “Lorenz and his party have, however, a difficulty about method which also dogs me constantly in this book.” In a discussion of animal ethologists, dogs is almost exactly the wrong metaphor, akin to saying that a broken toe can be a terrific pain in the neck.
Very common though such metaphors are — they are the metaphorical equivalent of unconscious puns — so far as I know, they have never been given a name. Aristotle provides a brief list of “inappropriate metaphors,” which includes those that are too grand or theatrical or ridiculous, but these metaphors do not quite qualify under any of his categories, except loosely under the ridiculous. They’re not good old-fashioned mixed metaphors. Nor are they those comic faux pas, such as William C. Carter, in his recent biography of Proust, falls into when he writes of his subject’s lycee days: “Another piece of work, written for M. Claude Courbaud’s literature class, showed that Marcel was making up for lost time.”
No, these metaphors are in a class of their own; they are metaphors that forget that the function of the metaphor is to show the similarity of different things and instead end up showing the similarity of similar things, but always askew, invariably with unintended comic effect. Inept metaphors with the quality of unconscious puns I hereby name them — call out the minicams, this is a press-conference moment — punaphors.
Sex is of course plentiful in its punaphoric possibilities. In THE WEEKLY STANDARD of some while back, someone (the guilty here shall all go nameless) wrote about Bill Clinton’s “attempts to skirt the truth.” But that is nothing — “a mere bag of shells,” as Ralph Kramden used to say — next to the unconscious comic genius who wrote, “We’ll only know the effect of passing out condoms to teenagers four or five years from now, when the rubber meets the road.”
Sports is rich in punaphors. I recently heard a sports announcer say, “Using injured players as an excuse for a loss is, in my opinion, nothing more than looking for a crutch.” Writing about the Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Paul McHugh, a journalist remarked that he is “never one to shrink from skewering the cults of Freud and Jung.” A television weatherman in Chicago, in great fatuous seriousness, announced that “differing tolerances among people for the cold is really a matter of degree.” In a New York Times obituary, a deceased woman who owned a button shop was described as “hooked on buttons.” (Put a zipper on that punaphor.) “These new socks,” I once heard a man say, “fit like a glove.” In Commentary, a writer, talking about teenage suicide, lapsed sadly into punaphor when she wrote: “Perhaps rather than being cases of copying, all these suicides have something grave in common.”
Food is another fine field for punaphors. “The butcher, in giving us this chili recipe,” someone once said in my presence, “didn’t give us a bum steer.” At a restaurant that served especially large portions, I heard a novelist I know say, “They certainly don’t spare the horses here,” to which his companion, quite properly, rejoined, “Let’s hope they do.” A supermarket in my neighborhood ran an ad in the local press that announced, “We want your feedback.” (Would it, if we returned it, give us back our money?) A friend not long ago said that she “could eat salad till the cows come home.” As a carnivore, I felt called upon to reply that “I on the other hand could eat cows till the salad comes home.”
Ain’t language a gas, a groove, the very first wonder of the world? No one, surely, is ever likely to develop a more efficient form of miscommunication, no way.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
