Mind your metaphors

Sometimes writers stretching for the lyrical founder on infelicities. They may come up with combinations that just don’t jibe, like a description of a cybergang member whose eyes were “black as blueberries.” (Since when are blueberries black?) David Mamet, in Make Believe Town, mocks screenwriters who gush, “She has a pair of eyes that makes you think of olives in a plate of milk.” Bet you wouldn’t want to taste a combo of olives and milk. Who would want to behold it?

Sometimes writers paste adjectives onto metaphors without thinking through the concomitant image. Stop and use some brain cells before resorting to a phrase like “the biggest bottleneck.” How can a bottleneck be gaping? “Most troublesome,” maybe. A media critic in the early days of the Internet described Microsoft’s excitable chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold as “speaking at the hypertext speed of the information revolution.” Hypertext speed? Since when was hypertext–a system of coding text linking electronic documents with each other–speedy? Then there was the music critic for the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, who heralded “the synergistic combination of the European style with the Russian melodic fertilizer which Tchaikovsky managed to spread across the orchestral field.”

Now that’s a tin ear.

Pass on the pabulum

Have you ever pondered those verbs that everyone uses but that make no sense? Revolve around, for example, and its cousin center around, usually marks a desperate attempt by an unimaginative writers to sound good.

Take this from a report on the National Ocean Conference in Monterey, California: “While the issues at the conference revolve around economics and politics, as well as science, the high public visibility of the oceans is a factor, too.” The earth may very well revolve around the sun, but what, exactly, do issues revolve around?

Don’t say “corporate innovation centers around Silicon Valley”; that makes no sense. Do say “Silicon Valley is the center of fin-de-siècle corporate experimentation.”

Sometimes such verbs are called “false limbs,” an apt term for meaningless words that a writer grabs onto rather than searching for stronger pillars. Don’t overlook strong single words, such as break, stop, spoil, and kill. Beware of phrases made of a noun or adjective tacked on to some general-purpose verb:

Avoid –> Use

• Make contact with –> Call, fax or email
• Exhibit a tendency –> Tend to
• Come to an agreement –> Agree
• Cause an investigation to be made –> Find out
• Does not see his way to –> Will not
• Is not in a position to –> Cannot
• Is prepared to inform you –> Will tell you

Don’t confuse like and as

Although each part of speech has a distinct function, and although putting the right parts in their right places always makes for more graceful writing and more eloquent speech, some errors are so persistent that many grammarians just give up and go descriptive-that is, they stop prescribing correct usage and start describing common usage.

The swapping of like, a preposition, for as or as if, both conjunctions, is one case the grittiest grammarians continue to oppose. Believe me, like wants to be followed by a good noun; like is longing to make a nice, tight, prepositional phrase: He looks like Woody Allen. As is used correctly when it introduces a clause (a subject and a verb): Do as I say, not as I do.

This is not rocket science. It’s easy to rephrase a thought through either a subordinate clause or a prepositional phrase. So there’s no reason to write “You can learn this little lesson, like I have” when these options are available: “You can absorb this little lesson, as I have” or “Like me, you can learn this little lesson.”