Saturday, April 3, 2010

New is in

Ever notice how contemporary English focuses less on the choice of big words for conveying something and more on the choice of words put into metaphors? Today I read this from someone's blog writing - 'it's a big deal like Godzilla's penis size' (Ouch). Jon Stewart the other day talked about going and doing his own thing - "I will Simon your Garfunkel ass and take off on my own".

I rather like this. I think it's imaginative, and I could never do it. My brain is not wired to think into metaphors.

On the other hand, as Ykas pointed out - CS people have this urge in them to use some technical jargon to describe something (am thankfully not in this category). I was drawing a graph on the board, you know, with nodes and edges. I erased edges to a group of nodes on one part of the graph, and said loudly - OK now what are these?

The CS guy replies - That is a disconnected component.

Yes Captain Obvious, I wasn't looking for a technical definition.

4 comments:

  1. "I will Simon your Garfunkel ass" is a very clever play on words. Punny almost! :)

    Godzilla's penis size vs Dr Manhattan's schlong dong, Hmm. The world weigh(t)s, the world waits!

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  2. Here's a guideline on metaphors worth using.
    Sheer brilliance.

    http://www.qwertyed.com/q_pages/q6_fun_pages/analogies.html

    You're welcome.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I know of some Hindi songs that have outstanding metaphors.

    ReplyDelete