The gentlemen of the Press regularly devote a small percentage of
their time to accusing each other of mixing metaphors or announcing
that they are themselves about to do so (What a mixture of metaphors!
If we may mix our metaphors. To change the metaphor), the offence
apparently being not to mix them, but to be unaware that you have done
it. The odd thing is that, whether he is on the offensive or the
defensive, the writer who ventures to talk of mixing metaphors often
shows that he does not know what mixed metaphor is. Two typical
examples of the offensive follow:
_The _Scotsman_ says: 'The crowded benches of the Ministerialists
contain the germs of disintegration. A more ill-assorted majority
could hardly be conceived, and presently the Opposition must realize
of what small account is the manoeuvring of the Free-Fooders or of any
other section of the party. If the sling be only properly handled, the
new Parliamentary Goliath will be overthrown easily enough. The stone
for the sling must, however, be found on the Ministerial side of the
House, and not on the Opposition side.' Apparently the stone for the
sling will be a germ. But doubtless mixed feelings lead to mixed
metaphors._ In this passage, we are well rid of the germs before we
hear of the sling, and the mixture of metaphors is quite imaginary.
Since literal benches often contain literal germs, but 'crowded
benches' and 'germs of disintegration' are here separate metaphors for
a numerous party and tendencies to disunion, our critic had ready to
his hand in the first sentence, if he had but known it, something much
more like a mixture of metaphors than what he mistakes for one.
_'When the Chairman of Committees--a politician of their own
hue--allowed Mr. Maddison to move his amendment in favour of secular
education, a decision which was not quite in accordance with
precedent, the floodgates of sectarian controversy were opened, and
the apple of discord--the endowment of the gospel of
Cowper-Temple--was thrown into the midst of the House of Commons.'
What a mixture of metaphor! One pictures this gospel-apple battling
with the stream released by the opened floodgates._ In point of fact,
the floodgates and the apple are successive metaphors, unmixed; the
mixing of them is done by the critic himself, not by the criticized;
and as to _gospel-apple,_ by which it is hinted that the mixture is
triple, the original writer had merely mentioned in the _gospel_
phrase the thing compared by the side of what it is compared to, as
when one explains _the Athens of the North_ by adding _Edinburgh._
Writers who are on the defensive apologize for _change_ and _mixture_
of metaphors as though one was as bad as the other; the two sins are
in fact entirely different; a man may change his metaphors as often as
he likes; it is for him to judge whether the result will or will not
be unpleasantly florid; but he should not ask our leave to do it; if
the result is bad, his apology will not mend matters, and if it is not
bad no apology was called for. On the other hand, to mix metaphors, if
the mixture is real, is an offence that should have been not
apologized for, but avoided. Whichever the phrase, the motive is the
same--mortal fear of being accused of mixed metaphor.
_...showed that Free Trade could provide the jam without recourse
being had to Protective food-taxes: next came a period in which (to
mix our metaphors) the jam was a nice slice of tariff pie for
everybody, but then came the Edinburgh Compromise, by which the jam
for the towns was that there were to be..._ When _jam_ is used in
three successive sentences in its hackneyed sense of consolation, it
need hardly be considered in the middle one of them a live metaphor at
all; however, the as-good-as-dead metaphor of jam _is_ capable of
being stimulated into life if any one is so foolish as to bring into
contact with it another half-dead metaphor of its own (i.e. of the
foodstuff) kind, and it _was_, after all, mixing metaphors to say the
jam was a slice of pie; but then the way of escape was to withdraw
either the jam or the pie, instead of forcing them together down our
throats with a ramrod of apology.
_Time sifts the richest granary, and posterity is a dainty feeder. But
Lyall's words, at any rate--to mix the metaphor--will escape the blue
pencil even of such drastic editors as they_. Since all three
metaphors are live ones, and _they_ are the sifter and the feeder, the
working of these into grammatical connexion with the blue pencil does
undoubtedly mix metaphors. But then our author gives us to understand
that he knows he is doing it, and surely that is enough. Even so some
liars reckon that a lie is no disgrace provided that they wink at a
bystander as they tell it, even so those who are addicted to the
phrase 'to use a vulgarism' expect to achieve the feat of being at
once vulgar and superior to vulgarity.
_Certainly we cannot detect the suggested lack of warmth in the speech
as it is printed, for in his speech, as in the Prime Minister's, it
seems to us that (if we may change the metaphor) exactly the right
note was struck_.
_We may, on the one hand, receive into our gill its precise content of
the complex mixture that fills the puncheon of the whole world's
literature, on the other--to change the metaphor--our few small
strings may thrill in sympathetic harmony to some lyrical zephyrs and
remain practically unresponsive to the deep-sea gale of Aeschylus or
Dante_.
Why, yes, gentlemen, you may change your metaphors, if it seems good
to you, but you may also be pretty sure that, if you feel the
necessity of proclaiming the change, you had better have abstained
from it.
_Two of the trump cards played against the Bill are (1) that 'it makes
every woman who pays a tax-collector in her own house', and (2) that
'it will destroy happy domestic relations in hundreds of thousands of
homes'; if we may at once change our metaphor, these are the notes
which are most consistently struck in the stream of letters, now
printed day by day for our edification in the_ Mail. This writer need
not have asked our leave to change from cards to music; he is within
his rights, anyhow, and the odds are, indeed, that if he had not
reminded us of the cards we should have forgotten them in the
intervening lines, but how did a person so sensitive to change of
metaphor fail to reflect that it is ill playing the piano in the
water? 'A stream of letters', it is true, is only a picturesque way of
saying 'many letters', and ordinarily a dead metaphor; but once put
your seemingly dead yet picturesque metaphor close to a piano that is
being played, and its notes wake the dead--at any rate for readers who
have just had the word _metaphor_ called to their memory.--H.W.
FOWLER.