Research is difficult. Long hours in the laboratory, or tedious hours in the clinic, guarantee nothing. There are lots of blind alleys, dead ends, cul-de-sacs, false trails, wild goose chases, and red herrings; lots of barking up the wrong tree and flogging dead horses. Like single words with similar meanings, these synonymous metaphors are subtly […]
Category: Metaphor watch
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Powerhouses and workhorses
The mitochondrion was termed the “powerhouse of the cell” in a Scientific American article in 1957 by Philip Siekevitz, who died in 2009. I suspect that anyone with biological knowledge would recognise the phrase instantly, and it’s an appropriate metaphor, so it’s odd that I couldn’t find it in any of the obituaries and articles […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Call a spade a tool
Between 1975 and 2010, the prevalence of the word tool or tools in PubMed increased six-fold, to more than 3% of all PubMed articles. If you’re writing about a spade, you’re writing about a tool; if you call a questionnaire a tool, it’s metaphorical. And it’s probably an unnecessary way of writing way, means, or […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Literally a metaphor
We use metaphor, a figure of speech, to explain or enliven: in doing so we write metaphorically, or figuratively. The opposite of metaphorically is literally. We don’t need to add metaphorically to a metaphorical statement; we rely on readers to recognise the metaphor: “Doctors’ morale has hit rock bottom,” not, “Metaphorically, doctors’ morale has hit […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: More misunderstood science, some usefully
Staying with astrophysics (qv), let’s think about dark matter and light years. As the Wikipedia entry states, “Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen with telescopes but would account for most of the matter in the universe.” The subtitle of an article in Science in 1984 was, “It fills the […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: other sciences, other images
PubMed accesses primarily the MEDLINE database of articles written about the life sciences but other sciences are represented too, even astrophysics. The first article turned up by searching black hole was “A possible macronova in the late afterglow of the long-short burst GRB 060614,” which is quite a long way from any biomedical phenomenon with […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: human to animal
The Rorschach inkblot test, used for psychological profiling and introduced in 1921, is well known, even if now little used. Few know of a similar test that was introduced in 1937. The “animal metaphor test” required the subject to draw the first two animals that came to mind and describe certain qualities of those animals: […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: I’m in the army now
Many metaphors are helpful; many metaphors are irritating; a few are harmful. It’s not surprising that military metaphors abound in medical writing: disease is the enemy; drugs are the weapons with which to fight. Then we can write about, “The armed truce between the intestinal microflora and host mucosal immunity,” or about how our victory […]
Neville Goodman: Drawbacks and deadlines
Drawback started life as excise duty paid back when goods were exported, but few doctors now writing of drawbacks are likely to realize that. There are over 5000 drawbacks on PubMed®, the first in 1916. It is a nice neat word, shorter than the literal disadvantage. But drawback is often replaceable by problem: …the algorithms […]
Neville Goodman: dead, revived, and mixed metaphors
Metaphors have a life and get tired, but dead metaphors are not just ones that have become very tired indeed. Dead metaphors have lost their original imagery, and have become absorbed into everyday language. For many people, some metaphors were never live. Those not familiar with baseball probably infer from its context that “step up […]