Word: metaphor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...whoa be it for anyone to think that e-mail itself is a private medium. The popular metaphor is to think of communication by e-mail as akin to communication by postcard. That is, as an e-mail message is sent across the country, and anybody with enough technical prowess can pick it up, read it and copy it. (Interestingly enough, however, the nature of the Internet protocol makes it virtually impossible for someone along the way to prevent the message from reaching its destination...
Obviously, instead of searching the Bests for this year's perfect metaphor, we should be studying the Worsts, some of which we have also identified. The Environment rubric "A Little Is Too Much" refers to the discovery that even trace amounts of dioxin can be harmful. Doesn't it also apply to the year as a whole? A little O.J. is too much; even a trace amount of Newt Gingrich goes a long way; a mere grain of Forrest Gump is dangerous. In the cases of love, valour and compassion, of course, too much would still have been too little...
...Stevens' new novel may be it. Scorched Earth (Atlantic; 276 pages; $21) is a funny, eye-rolling, knee-walking story of an incestuous Senate campaign in one of those nameless Southern states -- somewhere between South Carolina and Georgia, perhaps -- that turn up in political novels. Incest is not a metaphor here. When political consultant Matt Bonney engineers the testimony of three black drag queens who say they have had sex with Congressman Luke Bonney, who is the opponent of Matt's candidate and also happens to be Matt's brother, Luke makes it known that he will counter the deadly...
...very best night. But even these performances are never mired in the wink-wink-nudge- nudge of condescension to either Shakespeare or the audience. As Donnellan and Ormerod proved in their version of Angels in America at the National Theatre, no play is so weighted down by metaphor or message that it cannot be made to sing and soar...
...crew are displaced aristocrats, glorious anachronisms. They are enslaved by bloodlust: every night a little death. They lean into the victims' necks and give them the hickey from hell, the infernal overbite -- the kiss that bleeds. The nightly rampages of these putty-faced predators suggest an aids metaphor: voluptuous sexuality with fatal consequences. And after a couple of hundred years, the vampires get the edgy sourness of people married too long...