Moving metaphors give me vertigo

ByJosh Bernoff

I’ve seen so much weirdly terrible writing in print that I’m jaded. But even so, every once in a while, I see a passage that leaves me unexpectedly dizzy and nauseated.

Here are the headline and lede of a Boston Globe story by Alex Speier on the state of the Red Sox pitchers:

Once again, a broken pitching pipeline appears to be dooming the Red Sox

Yes, the Red Sox offense has hit a wall that has accelerated the hurtle away from contention. But while they have endured a two-week offensive blip, there are larger forces at play that have again led to a second-half plummet.

We’ve got a broken pipeline in the headline and a bunch of motion metaphors in the lede, along with a blip. I don’t blame Speier for the headline; somebody else probably wrote that. But his two-sentence lede includes:

  • hit a wall
  • accelerated
  • hurtle away from contention
  • plummet

Clearly something is moving. But things that hit walls tend to stop, not accelerate or hurtle. And wall-hitting generally refers to horizontal movement, while plummeting is vertical.

This lede doesn’t know where it’s going (or stopping). The last time I experienced that much violent vertical and horizontal movement in that short a time I was watching Wile E. Coyote in a Roadrunner cartoon.

Even ledes about plummeting demand steady writing

Metaphors are illuminating. Mixed metaphors are distracting. I fear that Alex, one of the most insightful sports analysts at the Globe, has spent too much time with colleague Chris Gasper, the steely-eyed squeaker swiper.

Don’t do crap like this. And if you somehow do, don’t let it get into print.

  • Pick one metaphor and stick with it for a while.
  • Read the lede two or three times. Is that really what you want to start with?
  • Get another reader or an editor to make sure you’re not taking readers on an unwanted roller-coaster ride.

The Red Sox pitching increasingly sucks, and unlike other teams, they have no reinforcements on the way. That may be the boring way to describe it, but it sure beats hitting a wall, accelerating, hurtling, and plummeting before you’ve taken your first sip of coffee.

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2 Comments

  2. Ah, yes, the plummeting pitfalls of Wile E. Coyote.

    Many years ago, when I worked ‘way Down East in Washington County, a favorite pastime of the locals was to check the Bangor Daily News’ social columns for the latest from a man who fancied himself the guru of cultural reviews. He panned everything, from the latest movie blockbuster to the local 4th Grade Christmas pageant. He never had a good word about anything anyone did in public, but it inspired his readers to flock to the movies, concerts, community theater offerings, and local children’s programs to see how good these events were, as opposed to his opinions that they were crap. The reasoning for this counter-promotion was that nobody could be as bad as this fellow said they were – and they weren’t. He used such high-falutin’ language in his reviews that we eventually caught him contradicting himself. His nose was so high in the air that he couldn’t see that his readers were not ignorant knuckle-draggers. He had no idea of the level of entertainment he provided the whole county with his pompous prose.

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