Be Careful with Your Metaphors
“You can’t curl up like a spoon”
Just last week I was helping with a wedding toast. In the speech, the writer described an argument between a couple that took place in a parking lot while eating fresh hot dogs. To articulate just how serious this argument was, he said it “boiled over.” This delighted me, because I could vividly see the dirty hot dog water spilling onto the blacktop, but unfortunately this was not what the writer had intended.
Another time, I advised on a toast an older brother gave at his little brother’s wedding. He described the intensity with which his brother pursued his interests as “going all in.” This is a well established poker metaphor, and works well enough, but the sorts of interests being described included “crypto” and “real-estate investing.” At least two problems with the poker metaphor have appeared:
You can’t go “all in” on two different financial investments at once
You probably don’t want to connect your brother’s business ventures to a casino game.
Metaphors are great! You should use them. Just take a moment to think about what else that metaphor means. Do you want to invoke all that the metaphor evokes?
