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Sunday, June 12, 2005
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BLOG THAT METAPHOR UD knows that her concern with mixed metaphors in public settings is tedious and pathetic, but she cannot help herself. Like many English professors, part of her is a petty bitter grammarian… For instance, there’s this article in today’s Denver Post that talks about the tenure system in American universities. It’s a thoughtful and useful piece, but rather than engage it on the interesting level of content, UD will simply identify its mixed metaphors. I’m sorry. “Cast by critics as academic carte blanche and a bane to progress, tenure has been challenged repeatedly since it became a pillar of American higher education in the 1940s, when it was invoked to shield professors' academic freedom from shifting political winds - and virtually guarantee lifetime employment. …[D]espite occasional high-profile conflagrations like the University of Colorado's recent Ward Churchill saga, sporadic experiments with non-tenured faculty and legislative challenges to the system, experts say tenure often percolates in public discussion but emerges essentially unscathed.” Here you have an example of how a long muddy river of incompatible figures can muck up your writing: Tenure begins as a blank check, morphs into a pillar that people use to shield themselves from the wind, and ends up as unscathed coffee. Some of the education officials interviewed for the article offer very nice metaphors and similes. One provost notes that for decades at her university tenure has been handed out “like dinner mints.” This is a nice figure because it picks up on the purely formal and also trivial nature of the process there. On the other hand, no less a figure than the chair of the faculty council at CU-Denver calls tenure “just one more hurdle that we have to go through.” Think about it. When’s the last time you went through a hurdle? Hurt, didn’t it? Next time, jump it. You go through a hoop. Here are two illustrations. The first is a pig named Nellie going through a hoop. The second is a Chocolate Lab, much like UD’s own Chocolate, going over a hurdle. |
