This writer need
not have asked our leave to change from cards to music; he is within
his rights, anyhow, and the odds are, indeed, that if he had not
reminded us of the cards we should have forgotten them in the
intervening lines, but how did a person so sensitive to change of
metaphor fail to reflect that it is ill playing the piano in the
water? 'A stream of letters', it is true, is only a picturesque way of
saying 'many letters', and ordinarily a dead metaphor; but once put
your seemingly dead yet picturesque metaphor close to a piano that is
being played, and its notes wake the dead--at any rate for readers who
have just had the word _metaphor_ called to their memory.--H.W.
FOWLER.
III. DEAD METAPHORS
Metaphor becomes a habit with writers who wish to express more emotion
than they feel, and who employ it as an ornament to statements that
should be made plainly or not at all. Used thus, it is a false
emphasis, like architectural ornaments in the wrong place. It demands
of the reader an imaginative effort where there has been no such
effort in the writer, an answering emotion where there is none to be
answered. And the reader gets the habit of refusing such effort and
such emotion; he ceases even to be aware of metaphors that are used
habitually. He may not consciously resent them; but unconsciously his
mind is wearied by them as the eye by advertisements often repeated.
By their sameness they destroy expectation so that, even if the writer
says anything in particular, it seems to be all generalities.
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