Confessions

[rinue]

Sometimes I use the word "metaphor" when I know damn well the phrase in question is a simile. I like the word "metaphor." I feel awful about this. I don't like the word "analogy," although I do like "analog."

It is like my poem about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, where I wrote "carriage" instead of "car" because it scanned better. Only, it's important that it's a car - he was proud of it being a car, went to trouble to find this car, one of the first made in Austria; this car was an example of the country's future. Eventually, guilt got the better of me, poetic license or not, and I revised.

I still have the assassin shoot through a window pane, even though this also did not happen. Even though not only was he outside of the cafe, but he ran up to the car and fired point blank, and the Archduke did not fall down; he stayed sitting up. But I have to leave the breaking window in - the sound, the image. I have to leave it because the cafe is the Archduke, and the window is his ability to look at the world, and mechanical terms for human processes were all the rage in the literature of the time, and the center of the poem is a

metaphor.

Comments

[marveloustrick.livejournal.com]

Yes, in a recent conversation with me you pitched me a series of similes that you called metaphors. This was fine with me, since metaphor is such a cooler word.

[achates.livejournal.com]

" I have to leave it because the cafe is the Archduke, and the window is his ability to look at the world, and mechanical terms for human processes were all the rage in the literature of the time, and the center of the poem is a

metaphor."

I love you. You know that, right?

[iridesce-sent.livejournal.com]

I've always thought of similes as a specific subset of metaphors, like rectangles are a lovely subset of parallelograms. They are still a comparison, just one that uses a specific formula.

Explaining:

"A is like B" is under the umbrella "A is B" because it still gives you semiotic time-travel, superimposing the idea of A over the idea of B. (I think of punning, too, as time-travel with a similar - no pun intended - superimposition of sound/meaning A over sound/meaning B.)

(And yeah, you have to hyphenate "time-travel," don't you?)

[rinue.livejournal.com]

That is the perfect description of how I have always felt about the metaphor/simile relationship, although I had never thought about the time travel/overwriting aspect - which is something I intend to hold up in the light and look at from various angles over the next several days, because it is a delightful new thought to enjoy.

I have to admit that I do not tend to hyphenate time travel; instead, I judge situation by situation whether I want it to be two words or one word. I have a general tendency to collapse words most people hyphenate and make them compound, or else separate compound words. Like I'll say "dog house" rather than "doghouse," if it fits the rhythm of the sentence, or I'll say "I'm a timetraveller." Sometimes, I spend several minutes going back and forth with different punctuation, agonizing - time traveller, timetraveller, time-traveller, timetraveller -

and incidentally, this draws attention to the fact that I always put two "L"s in traveller, or it looks like a proper name to me. I need those paralell lines - like a road, or train tracks, or the different ways life could go. I normally go back and fix this during the revision stage, but I'm leaving it in here. It is like the way I couldn't solve math equations quickly unless I was allowed to first arrange the terms so they looked pleasant to me.