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Subject:Re: It's not illiteracy, but... From:Joanna Sheldon <cjs10 -at- CORNELL -dot- EDU> Date:Tue, 6 Jun 1995 19:19:28 -0400
Arlen Walker says...
>Perhaps it's immetaphoracy.
I sympathize!
Your mini-diatribe brought to mind Fowler's dissertation on metaphor. (_A
Dicttionary of Modern Usage_). I'll quote from my favorite
paragraph/sentence. He posits that some metaphors are living and some are
dead...
"...i.e., have been so often used that speaker & hearer have ceased to be
aware that the words used are not literal; but the line of distinction
between the live & the dead is a shifting one, the dead being sometimes
liable, under the stimulus of an affinity or a repulsion, to galvanic
stirrings indistinguishable from life. Thus, in _The men were sifting meal_
we have a literal use of _sift_; in _Satan hath desired to have you, that he
may sift you as wheat_, _sift_ is a live metaphor; in _the sifting of
evidence_, the m. is so familiar that it is about equal chances whether
_sifting_ or _examination_ will be used, & that a sieve is not present to
the thought -- unless indeed someone conjurs it up by saying _All the
evidence must first be sifted with acid tests_, or _with the microsocope_;
under such a stimulus our m. turns out to have been not dead but dormant;
the other word, _examine_, will do well enough well enough as an example of
the real stone-dead m.; the Latin _examino_, being from _examen_ the tongue
of a balance, meant originally to weigh; but, though weighing is not done
with acid tests or microsopes any more than sifting, _examine_ gives no
convulsive twitches, like _sift_, at finding itself in their company;
_examine_, then, is dead m., & _sift_ only half dead, or three-quarters."
...Joanna
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C. Joanna Sheldon, PhD
GRAPHTEX Consulting
Technical Writing, Information Design,
Translation (French, German, Italian)
cjs10 -at- cornell -dot- edu * joanna -at- well -dot- com
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