"Real Artists Ship"

Colin Johnson’s blog


Archive for the ‘Observations’ Category

Mixed Metaphors (1)

Friday, October 2nd, 2009

A while ago there was a BBC Radio 4 trailer (trail? What is the difference; it used to always be “trailer” but now it seems usually to be “trail”) which contained the wonderful mixed metaphor “we’re on the very precipice of an runaway train”. Therefore, it seems reasonable to award an “Runaway Train Precipice Award” to similar endeavours in mixed metaphor. Candidate One comes from a punter on Dragon’s Den a couple of weeks ago, who had the excellent metaphor “when you buy a pizza, you expect it to do what it says on the tin”. Tinned pizza, yum! That said, there were (and probably still are) Fray Bentos tinned steak and kidney pies, so I suppose tinned pizza isn’t entirely outwith the realms of possibility.

Zeitgeist (1)

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Overheard metaphor: “falling faster than a bank”.