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Tuesday, July 04, 2006

Legs at the Heart

David Foster suggests I go back to the mixed metaphor sentence I quoted a couple of posts down --

France began this tournament saddled with worries about the ageing legs at the heart of their team, but they have changed their tune.


--- and talk about why it’s embarrassing.

In principle, figurative language is a good thing. You don’t want to be all abstract and Latinate in your prose; you want colorful, fresh, image-rich writing. But you also don’t want to confuse the hell out of your reader, and throwing a bunch of mismatched images at her makes the sentence messy and illogical.

Partly this is about how the brain works as we read. We’re very obedient souls. If you throw the word “saddled” at us, we’ll dutifully picture, if only faintly, a saddle, with maybe a horse under it.

The word “saddled” means weighed down, as a horse can be weighed down with too heavy a saddle. So perhaps we visualize, as we read this word, a nag bent under the burden of a heavy saddle. We go from this literal image to the concept of a person burdened with problems; and, in the particular context of this sentence -- part of an essay about the French World Cup team -- we go to the French people, worried that their famous but aging (“ageing” is a British variant) star player won’t be up to the competition.



Even without the figurative jumble about to occur, I’d have chosen a different image. We’re talking about a sport here, soccer; yet the word “saddled” may well make us think in terms of a whole other realm of sport, this one involving horses -- polo, racing. Already our brains are trotting off on a tangent.

The writer then uses a synecdoche (a figure of speech where you use a part of something or someone for the whole -- here, legs for player), somewhat awkwardly, and, much more horribly, she goes on to offer the weird anatomy of “the ageing legs at the heart” of the French team.

You sort of see how the writer got in this muddle. Figuratively, “heart” in this context means “center,” as in the star player on the team. But the word’s close proximity to another part of the anatomy -- legs -- has us reading it literally, not figuratively. What image do our dutiful brains produce at this point? Something like this maybe.

This cannot be what the writer wanted. She has lost control of her writing, and of her reader, whose mind now moves, a la Timothy Leary, from sweaty mounts to hearts with knobby knees sticking out of them.

Cue music. “But they have changed their tune.” This final phrase, which comes out of nowhere, adds fuel to the garbage incinerator. It is, first of all, a cliché (so are “saddled with worries” and “at the heart of” -- the use of cliché in itself puts you at risk for mixed metaphor, since you’re not thinking of the literal values of the words in the cliché); but, more importantly, it jerks our brains around to an entirely new realm of life - music - when we’d barely begun to make sense of the tired, long-limbed heart.

Maybe a vaudeville scene suggests itself at this point. Maybe the heart’s legs begin to dance.




Of course assimilating prose isn’t as meticulous and difficult as this analysis suggests. But something roughly like this sense-making activity does go on when we read an extended description, and the language of that description can work for or against the making of sense.