It is not just medical authors who use metaphors. It is not just in medical writing that we find them. We—doctors and patients—use them every day. Can you describe the pain? It’s like a knife; it’s as if someone was grinding their fist into my breastbone; it was just like a heavy weight on my […]
Category: Metaphor watch
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Dream a dream of ivory castles in the air
We’ve had magic bullets (q.v.) and holy grails (q.v.). Last autumn, another unobtainable appeared on The BMJ’s news pages: “Is Hunt’s plan to expand medical student numbers more than a party conference pipe dream?” Pipe dream (sometimes hyphenated) originated in the US in the late 19th century, meaning (OED) a fantastic or impracticable notion or […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Explosion? Usually barely a puff
There are about 10000 explosions in PubMed®. There are dust explosions, gas explosions, explosion injuries. In the last year, there have been 11 reports of electronic cigarette explosions. As I write, the media are getting a bit “dangerous dog” about it, without mentioning the number of people who burned themselves and their relatives to death […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: leave cocktails to the bar staff
Cocktail isn’t a common word in PubMed®, but its prevalence increased eight-fold between 1975 and 2015. Cirrhosis is six times more common but increased only 1.3-fold, which is probably not importantly different from unity. We could conclude that a cocktail won’t give you cirrhosis, but these cocktails are not funny coloured drinks that taste dangerously […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Not a raft unless it’s flat and keeps you afloat
Raft has three primary meanings (COD): a flat buoyant structure or small boat; a floating mass of fallen trees, ice, etc.; foundation concrete for a building. From the second meaning it has come to mean a large amount of something. This makes it an attractive word. There are 7000 rafts in PubMed. One thousand are […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: From cast iron to concrete
In the last blog, I looked at cast iron as a metaphor for strong. You could say that concrete was analogous as a metaphor for real: we want concrete evidence, not just something glimpsed in passing, or some vague speculation. I found over 300 papers in PubMed that presented concrete evidence: “…no concrete evidence demonstrating […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Cast iron
The BMJ’s columnist, Margaret McCartney, wrote that we need, “cast iron divisions between healthcare and industry” because their priorities are different. (Being The BMJ, there was no hyphen; but dictionaries give the substance cast iron as two words and the adjective cast-iron as hyphenated.) Margaret used the metaphorical cast iron instead of the literal clear, […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: No, we aren’t nearly there
It must be one of the most annoying and predictable child behaviours. Perhaps even more predictable than asking if orange juice has got bits in. Any journey of any length will be punctuated by the repeated question, “Are we nearly there?” Put “children car journeys nearly there” into Google and you’ll get lots of advice. […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Stepping stones and stumbling blocks
A stepping stone is an action that helps one to make progress towards a goal. This definition, from the COD, includes the metaphorical goal. Although the etymology of goal (according to the OED) is “difficult,” it is indisputably a sporting term, first recorded in 1531. Its literal synonyms are aim or objective. In 2014, nearly […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Once it was just oil, now it’s investigators
A curious thing has happened to pipeline. The word—although originally, as happens with many words, as two separate words—is first recorded by the OED in the early days of the oil industry in the last quarter of the 19th century. Its first metaphorical use was recorded in Aldous Huxley’s first novel Crome Yellow (1921). Not […]