Metaphors are never exact, but they can sure be fun

The latest Frank Bruni e-newsletter is full of great stuff, and I highly recommend subscribing to it so you see it every week. Here are a few rhetorical gems:

In The Washington Post, Sally Jenkins has been critiquing the Saudi-financed LIV Golf Invitational Series and its money-mad participants, some of whom are crying foul over their banishment from the rival PGA Tour. 

“These are not millworkers taking on U.S. Steel to champion freedom for the working guy, as their preposterous antitrust lawsuit would make them out to be,” Jenkins wrote. “They’re dealbreakers who do exactly as they please for profit.” She later added: “Norma Raes in gaberdine, they are not. And their legal arguments are spit bubbles blown by conceited airheads.” 

One teaching point is the use of examples that are NOT equal to the subject being criticized, creating contrast. By invoking two references to union workers (our students would not recognize "Norma Rae" without some help), we see the contrast between rich guys wanting more money and true labor leaders.

Also in The Post, Philip Bump skewered Trump’s shifting responses to the F.B.I.’s retrieval of documents from Mar-a-Lago by evoking Schrödinger’s cat: “This is Schrödinger’s declassification. Everything is both classified and declassified until Trump is asked about it, at which point it settles into whichever position is most useful for Trump.” 

This one needs more serious background for students to "get it." I'm not sure I completely follow the paradox, so I defer to Wikipedia for the following: 

In simple terms, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat and something that could kill the cat (a radioactive atom) in a box and sealed it, you would not know if the cat was dead or alive until you opened the box, so that until the box was opened, the cat was (in a sense) both "dead and alive." This is used to represent how scientific theory works. No one knows if any scientific theory is right or wrong until said theory can be tested and proved.

For most readers, a deep knowledge of this 1936 thought experiment is not necessary. All most readers are expected to know is that a reference to Schrödinger's cat has to do with not being able to nail down the status of an observable phenomenon. This is a case where it takes so long to explain the "joke" that it doesn't seem worth the effort. Perhaps some other paradox might help?

Biting reviews depend on precise rhetoric

A truth for review writing is that it is so much more fun to be critical and (often) cutting when reviewing a product or movie or legislation or, well, anything.

In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane questioned the decision of the rapper known as Bad Bunny to appear alongside Brad Pitt in a new movie: “It seems that Mr. Bunny is using ‘Bullet Train’ to branch out into acting. He may want to branch back in.”

Nice twist on the idiom, particularly since we never say, "I'm going to branch IN to increase my efficiency (or whatever)."

In The Times, Alexandra Jacobs reviewed a new book about the life of the electronics retailer known as Crazy Eddie, noting that after he dropped out of high school, he “apprenticed for a young uncle at clip joints near 42nd Street in Manhattan before joining his father and cousin Ronnie in a TV and appliance enterprise on Kings Highway. And the rest is huckstory.”

That final word is the pay-off for the entire sentence, ending with a pun and with a punch.

A final review example is from a scathing book review of a memoir, from which we might choose any number of zingers.

Dwight Garner reviewed “Breaking History,” Jared Kushner’s new memoir: “This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox.” 

This is an extended simile, wrapped in a complex set of clauses and phrases... and the writer never loses control. Fun stuff.