2008 was an 11. After overdue consideration and numerous recounts, The Metaphor Observatory has reached a reluctant concensus among staff. The 2008 Top Ten Metaphors list was particularly difficult due to the enormous diversity of metaphors used to describe the candidates of the American election and the causes of the financial crisis. While the crisis [...]

They’re off. It’s on. But is it a race or is it a battle? On this, the last day before the election (whew!), we take pause to recall the long babblefest that has slopped our airwaves, headlines and carpools. Who can forget the defiant 2006 Time magazine cover “…The Next President”? [1]; the rebelious maturing [...]

Building a bigger, better hole… Many observers have noticed an awful lot of metaphors are being used to describe the current American financial crisis. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, the Metaphor Observatory opined that this surge of metaphor was a response to the fact that nobody could understand the situation. As [...]

John accused of spending too much time on the Joe… The last presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama was also the last straw. The debate was awash with references to Joe The Plumber, tipping the scales of nomination for The Metaphor Observatory’s 2008 Top Ten List of Metaphors. We can only take so [...]

Economic woes blamed on outsourced metaphors… Metaphor reshapes our thinking, making Play-Doh of our conceptual frameworks. Not sure how plumbing works? Just put it into so-called traffic terms like flow, jam and back-up. Despite the many apparent dissimilarities between water and cars, somehow our minds readily bridge between liquids and groups of solids. The metaphors [...]

Borrego boldly goes where no ‘phor has gone before. A commercial for the Kia Borrego has been nominated for recognition at the 2008 Top Ten Metaphors awards, to be held in December. The Borrego (that’s “lamb” to those who habla español), a new sport utility plebiphor, shares the phosphor stage with the word “metaphor” in [...]

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 [...]

Taepodong missile test raises the stakes… Tonight’s “Situation Room”, as seen on news-guru CNN, offered this introductory tidbit by host John King: And all bets are off. It’s 7:00 p.m. in Atlantic City where casinos are the latest target of a New Jersey government shutdown. Will it pay off for the state or break the [...]