Whichever the phrase, the motive is the
same--mortal fear of being accused of mixed metaphor.
_...showed that Free Trade could provide the jam without recourse
being had to Protective food-taxes: next came a period in which (to
mix our metaphors) the jam was a nice slice of tariff pie for
everybody, but then came the Edinburgh Compromise, by which the jam
for the towns was that there were to be..._ When _jam_ is used in
three successive sentences in its hackneyed sense of consolation, it
need hardly be considered in the middle one of them a live metaphor at
all; however, the as-good-as-dead metaphor of jam _is_ capable of
being stimulated into life if any one is so foolish as to bring into
contact with it another half-dead metaphor of its own (i.e. of the
foodstuff) kind, and it _was_, after all, mixing metaphors to say the
jam was a slice of pie; but then the way of escape was to withdraw
either the jam or the pie, instead of forcing them together down our
throats with a ramrod of apology.
_Time sifts the richest granary, and posterity is a dainty feeder. But
Lyall's words, at any rate--to mix the metaphor--will escape the blue
pencil even of such drastic editors as they_. Since all three
metaphors are live ones, and _they_ are the sifter and the feeder, the
working of these into grammatical connexion with the blue pencil does
undoubtedly mix metaphors. But then our author gives us to understand
that he knows he is doing it, and surely that is enough.
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