Candidates butt heads…The advantage of having dictators is that you can obey them without ever having to listen to them. That is, a dictator’s voice is heard as “do as I say”, not “listen to what I say”. A sublty not lost on Observers, who are being swamped with electoral rhetoric gone overboard. During the [...]

Put up your dukes and vote! Face it. Every four years, like a greasy clockwork, the candidates spin into position and chime off. The Metaphor Observatory heard the ticks, then the cuckoos, and now the bells. The boxing metaphors have struck again. Don’t be alarmed… This is a growing list of boxing metaphors observed in [...]

2007: A Titanic year for metaphor! This marks the third year for the Metaphor Observatory’s ever-so-nerdpopular Top Ten Metaphors List. In years past, the Observatory staff had gorged themselves on a slurry of metaphor from the media trough, digested it, then regurgitated it for an inexplicably unappetized virtual readership. We knew that we needed a [...]

The tsunami metaphor is conceived, born and labored. Rarely do we witness the conception, gestation and birth of a metaphor. Usually a metaphor slides into being, the product of say, poetry, witticism or observation. We grasp the conceptual links because the pathways in between are well worn: beaten subconsciously into life by familiarity; beaten to [...]