Word: metaphor
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Most suspense-filled question of January: How will Susan Sontag resolve her two-part series on "Illness as Metaphor" in January's New York Review of Books? So far, she has proved in exhausting detail that 19th century authors considered tuberculosis a romantic disease. Apparently, part two will show that modern authors do not consider cancer romantic. It all rather leads one to worry about Sontag's worldview: it is a bit morbid, after all, to describe the difference between the centuries in terms of fatal diseases...
That Georgia thigh-slapper provides the President with a metaphor to explain the trouble he has faced for almost a year. When he took office, his desk was piled high with work undone, needs neglected, problems postponed. Such urgent tasks as creating an energy policy, stopping the drain of Social Security funds and reforming the tax and welfare systems had been ignored or put off, largely because nobody had solutions that seemed workable or politically feasible. Like a quarterback who prefers the long bomb to the drudgery of three yards and a cloud of dust, the President threw...
...Israeli official, trying to sum up Middle East events, turned to metaphor: "It was a storm that blew away the old leaves and limbs and left Sadat and Begin at the top of a very high tree, precariously balanced and swaying in the wind. Now they will have to grasp each other's hands to keep from falling...
...blind date," originally a slang phrase for a rape technique Levanter learns as an adolescent, soon becomes a metaphor Kosinski uses to describe people's willingness to embark on the dramatic, unpredictable incidents with which he feels they should fill their lives...
Levanter fills his life with such incidents, and, as the metaphor develops, his curious, slightly unrealistic lifestyle becomes comprehensible, if not quite admirable...