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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Passing Muster
A hands on critique of body metaphors
Saturday, 2008-03-29 | Language, On Writing Well
| To ask Antek for a martini would have been equivalent to asking him for a kiss. It wasn't done. Antek kissed no one but his wife and served no man anything but whisky and beer. |
Generally speaking, I don't mind a military metaphor.
Given that, as Rasczak says, violence is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived, military metaphors seem inescapable. Conflict inheres in the physical and emotional human experience, struggle is the immutable constant and primary condition upon which all other circumstances and situations depend for definition and adversity is the cosmic force that allows for human subjectivity (i.e. the notion of "otherness"). Fine. There's a reason that a military metaphor is just as good as any other metaphor nine times out of 10 and that's the reason.
In the hands of the inarticulate or unpracticed, of course, military metaphors are just like any other metaphors in that they can easily run the gamut from stultifying to offensive. But you can't really hold that against them.
You know what's been driving be batshit lately? Body metaphors. Human body metaphors.
Ever since the Recession has been in the news and the Fed has been cutting interest rates and we're all getting $300 checks from the IRS, these damn things are turning up like bad pennies. The economy is ailing, the federalis are planning to inject a stimulus and, in addition to restoring its health, federal officials want to immunize the economy against future illness.
The troubled US economy is hardly the alpha and omega, however. These guys are going to do some torture testing on the iPhone. These other guys are driving muscle cars. Some other guys are taking this or that aspect of the project and making it their baby.
I catch people using body metaphors all over the place. And it makes me a little crazier every time it happens--I can't stop listening for it. It's like the FedEx arrow: once you've picked up on it, you can't stop picking up on it and it haunts your waking life.
Unlike military metaphors, the use of which is justified by the ubiquity of conflict and struggle in the human experience, body metaphors just seem cheap. Unnecessary. Sort of like the body itself.
Chalk it up to the "relaxed disdain" that I've cultivated for the flesh and take it with a grain of salt, but you've at least got to concede that nine times of out 10, using a body metaphor just plain debases the subject, the speaker and the auditor. It lowers whatever we're talking about to that which is most base about us--that sweating, shitting, shivering, rotting dead-weight in which we're all trapped until it finally craps out on us and kills us along with it.
It's either that, or use of a body metaphor attempts to aggrandize the meat--to raise it to the level of cellular telephone or car, to the level of a genuine achievement of the human intellect--and, in doing so, exposes the meat for exactly what it is: automatic. A given. A thing to be concealed with costumes and cosmetics, a thing to be shamefully maintained in private, a thing that's just sort of there, that's always been there and that is about as capable of meaningful expression as the frozen ground beneath a steaming pretzel of freshly pinched dog shit.
