Didn't really work, did it?

I see.

For my part, I have a personal rule - even if I don't like someone's style of posting, I won't criticise it unless I feel it breaks the posting guidelines. There are too many "easy" targets: people whose first language is not English, some with an odd sense of humour, people trying something a little new.

I guess it's about tolerance and respect.

Annie, bless her acuity, knows what I was at, and is right to say that an odd smiley would help.

I really had no intent to criticize *anyone*, least of all you. I liked your analogy -- but it gave me an idea of playing a little game that I've been dabbling with recently, viz, dodgy analogies. Analogies that collapse on themselves, or contain no information, or too much, or try to create impossible linkages or blatantly obvious ones.

Steven Pinker devotes part of a chapter to this topic in one of his books -- and a list of examples has been in wide circulation on the web for years: various versions can be found by googling 'worst analogies' or something similar.

So that's our context. When I see an analogy, I jump in with another one -- hopefully a bad one, but so far most of my efforts have come out confusing, or unfunny, or just dumb. This one seems to have been confusing.

It goes without saying (to me) that no critique of the original analogy or analogizer is intended.

It reminds me -- this, oddly, is a genuine analogy, of sorts -- of the time I wrote a pretty negative article about a film, which was published prominently in a 'quality' Sunday paper. A little later I was in a restaurant, having a meal with a film producer turned film academic, who introduced me to an acquaintance at a nearby table. Who turned out to be the guy who made the film I'd slated.

And I said something awesomely stupid, along the lines of "Your film wasn't really my target -- I was criticising republicanism [or whatever] and you just got in the way."

That's Irish republicanism, of a frequently militant nature. Telling such people that you've been metaphorically shooting at them is not a good idea. Telling them that they just got caught in the crossfire is so imbecilic it still makes me wince.

Anyhow, I can be stupid. It goes with the territory when you try to be clever. Apparently.

Maybe if I tried to be stupid I'd have better results.

For what it's worth, I agree with your ideas re tolerance and respect, though I'm not always so nice. But I have enormous respect for anyone posting here whose first language is not English: very few of us anglophones could do half as well in any other language. I would never criticise their errors (and I've often expressed my extreme distaste for what I call *sado-lollery* -- the tendency to use 'lol' as a sort of sneer, rather than as an appreciation of something funny or humorous).

Nor, mostly, would I bother to comment on errors made by native English speakers -- though I might privately wish that certain people would go to the trouble of reading over their words before posting them. It's called proofreading, and it doesn't take long.

None of this applies to you, however, since you write very well and clearly take care to express yourself with maximal clarity. The world needs people like that. I'm too linguistically warped to be one, but I respect what they do.

Finally, to make the analogy thing as clear as I can: when I wrote <like a person who practices really stupid analogies in public> I was simply trying to create a stupid analogy. It never crossed my mind that you or anyone else would think I was referring to them.

Since I can now see how that reading -- though unintended -- was possible, I apologize.

Hey ... it was a really stupid analogy after all. I succeeded ... kinda.

You know, like a chess player who reaches out to moves his Queen to h6 and announce checkmate, but picks up his King instead by mistake and blurts out 'I resign', and only later notices that the King move is also a forced mate in six moves. I did something like this once, but that's another story, <Once>.

Not just any old translation, of course. Since I seem to have a certain facility with rhyme (it can be dense and doesn't always make sense, but it rhymes, most times) the idea is a translation into rhyming couplets. In the manner of Alexander Pope, who gave Homer a similar makeover in the 18th century.

Is this just the eccentric linguistic doodling of an old fart, or a valid exercise in postmodern post-validity and formalist appropriation? Me, I dunno. But it's the kind of thing that I like doing.

As some reviewer once wrote -- sadly, it wasn't me -- <For those of you who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like>.

The following example is a Limerick, or maybe some kind of metalimerick. Has any Metal band thought of naming an album 'Imerick'? If they haven't, it's too late now: albums and album titles are so over.

Jessica and I were once ticked off, in this very place and by the management of this very place, for overdoing the limericks. They were 'dirty'. How do words get dirty?

I don't know. Demme, I haven't even had a proper brainwashing in years. Just neocortical showers: no soaping or soaking.

<Thus Dom, once on a time
Looked round for a mountain to climb
But the *mission creep*
Made the task rather steep
Till he found that the words wouldn't *scan properly or even have the similar endings that were necessary for the proper auditory effect*.>

If you would win
And winning, so they say
Is central to the purpose of the play
Then, once developed, try to use your brain
Let men advance; and let them form a chain.

Such chains of pawns will save you from the fog
Of aimless play. They work against the Frog
They fence him in, they make his Bishop weak
A soft, fat cleric, idle (if not meek).

Let nothing stay your hand, let no complaint
Delay you in your object of restraint.
Like fashionable folk in bondage gear
You knot 'em tightly, hovering with your spear.

But do no spearing yet; your manly stick
Should be held back; not e'en a little prick
Should warn th'opponent of the coming plan
Tis better far to sacrifice a man
To let him waste his time in chasing pawns
While you prepare the noose, and Fortune yawns.

I saw a battle once, in Nether Lands
A low-lying place, of sea and shifting sands
Scheveningen, or in Gravelines?
A battle lost, with hasty Javelins.
Twas near the delta of the river Aa
The victors, yelling, loosed a joyous 'Yah!'
The losers? Can't remember what they said;
Beside the point. The losers, then, were dead.

It's just a pity that he never thought of leaving an unobtrusive vampire-killing device in the oval office. I guess he was of the old school - innocent or gentlemanly enough to think that no fiend from hell could be elected to the presidency. How could anyone in the 19th century imagine Nixon?

Queen Mom:
"See, honey? If I stand right beside you here on c6 you can go all the way! You can earn promotion! With some help from your Dad, you can be a Queen like me!"

- "Who's Mummy's little darling, then? Who's the Queen's Pawn? Wave at your friends over at the castle, dear. And comb your hair."

King, addressing nobody in particular.

- "Get out of me way, child. Who let these sprogs all over the 2nd rank. With my gammy legs - don't they know I can only take one step at a time. And everyone has it in for me. I need a beer."

Queen, to King.

I hope so too.

I guess that the danger with in-jokes is that those not in the club may well misunderstand. And the risk with analogies is that the audience may draw a different conclusion to the one that you intended.

A little snatch of Gerard Manley Hopkins:

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

... and cue the debate about what exactly does "shook foil" mean? Are we talking wobbling tinfoil, or a swishing sword?

Funny how passage of time alters meanings. If GM Hopkins was writing now, I would be certain that 'foil' was druggy code.

Then again: I once assisted in a very junior capacity at a Hopkins conference, held in what is now Newman House - a building used by UCD, University College Dublin, for miscellaneous odds'n'ends. The UCD chess club used to play there when I was a member. In Hopkins' time, it pretty much *was* the college where he taught, including residential quarters.

As part of that Hopkins conference, we did a thorough search of the building to locate his old room - and found it, in what had become a gents' toilet.

But I'm probably some kind of anarchistic nihilist, and the world would go to *the bad place* if I wuz in charge...

Also, I just like meta-rules. I think I'll be a metaphysical poetaster when I grow up.

So what would you do, if you metaphysical poetaster?

No, no, no. Not an <odd> smiley. I specifically said an *understandable* smiley. Common, garden variety smilies. Normal. Conventional. Yanno? :p

Alternatively, one can type 'j/k', but personally I hate that and would rather tack on a smiley or five any time. ;)

I suspect my problem with smileys is that they've been around so long that all the variations are played out. Like the Ruy Lopez. Just a tad too normal and traditional for a chap who likes to invert things.

Heh. You got me for a second there, with the clod-hate axis ("I can feel the heat closing in..." also means "the cops are watching me"): and in this, um, jurisdiction (does anyone else live in a country which is routinely referred to as a jurisdiction?), 'heat' is often pronounced 'hate' ...

- Isn't the hate terrible?

- Oh, aye, tis wicked. Must be nare 30 degrees.

Cue: The Adventures of Keats & Chapman, episode 131.

In the village of Leap - pronounced Lepp - about 50 odd miles west of the city of Cork, Keats and Chapman opened a lingerie factory. They trousered the grants, then plentiful, available from the EU for bringing underwear to underwear-deprived areas.

Residents please note: this was in the past. I have it on good authority that underwear is now quite common in Leap, even the French kind.

However, our story took place in more innocent times. A group of angry locals, thinking they'd been conned into making "brand new clean dirty clothes", advanced on the factory to burn it down. As one does, especially when one is an angry mob.

Moving fast, Keats and Chapman loaded their stock into a van and drove pell-mell for Cork airport. In their haste, they neglected to close the van doors, and their lingerie was strewn across 50 miles of countryside.

"Corset!" cried Keats. Chapman was more phlegmatic. Gazing back down the country road, he said "There's many a slip twixt Cork and Leap."