A mixed metaphor in writing is usually defined as any sentence or passage that
contains two or more metaphors that don't really fit with each other, and if
you look at the first example here we see a mixed metaphor. We have Tom and
Sally drifting apart, kind of like two ships that are on the ocean, and then it
also says, "they didn't sever all ties." So severing all ties -- you can think of
like a rope or something like that, and it's splitting in the middle or tearing
apart. You can see then that these metaphors don't quite fit, unless
the two ships are being tied together with a rope.
Now there's ship number one, there's ship number two, and now we have the two
metaphors working together. But I think you can tell that this doesn't quite
work and we would be better off picking one metaphor and developing it more
consistently. So that's a mixed metaphor then, at least as most people would
define it: a sentence or a passage that has two or more metaphors that don't
really fit together. Some people define a mixed metaphor more narrowly as
basically two metaphors that have really got kind of muddled up and stuck
together. If you say, for instance, "He was a duck out of water" ...
the usual expression is "he was a fish out of water." Now I suppose it
still works as a duck out of water, but if somebody says this they've probably
thought of another metaphor which is that it's water off a duck's back, and
they've just kind of jumbled the two metaphors or the two expressions
together and turned it into a duck out of water. So that's another way to think of
mixed metaphors, as taking two metaphors or expressions and really squishing them
together as opposed to simply loosely having them somewhere in the same
sentence. We're not going to look at this second kind of example as much. We're
going to really focus on our first definition of a mixed metaphor, and we'll
look at a few more examples. So here are a few more examples then. The first one
goes, "Let's not complain. Let's soldier on silently while we drum up some more
support." I hope you can see that drumming up is
loud, whereas soldiering on silently is quite silent! So it doesn't quite match does
it? The next one has a whole bunch of metaphors. It goes, "Oh no! She has broken
down again ..." Think of like a car breaking down. "She's just a sea of tears or a
rollercoaster of emotions." I don't know if many people would write like this, but
you can see the problem here: too many metaphors. And then the last example here
(at least the short examples) is one that uses mixed metaphors but maybe does it
correctly. Because it's not always wrong to mix metaphors. This one says, "He's not
down to earth (so think of like literally being down to earth). He always has his
head in the clouds." You can see that head in the clouds -- that
raises our eyes upwards and "down to earth" sort of makes us look down. But in
this case it's a contrast, and I think the two expressions nicely work together
to create this kind of contrast. That's where you can see that mixed metaphors
(while you should watch out for them) are not always bad. And I hesitate to suggest
that you delete every single mixed metaphor. But if you do mix your
metaphors too much, then you end up with this kind of passage, and we'll finish
with this. This is a passage from a scholarly work and in general it's quite
a good book. The book is called The Law is a White Dog. It's quite an interesting book,
but it contains a ridiculous amount of jargon and a lot of mixed metaphors. So I
picked out this passage to show you how mixed metaphors can really
muddle up your writing. Here we have the "common-law hoard of precedent,"
and I think of a hoard as something like a hoard of treasure ... that
Smaug the dragon maybe is protecting. Then we have a bunch of jargon: "in its
language and iteration." "Iteration" just means repetition. "Drags into light the
myths of modernity" -- I'm not sure how you literally drag a
myth. A myth is sort of a concept, it's a story. It's not something you can really
drag. But the other question is how does a
hoard drag anything? You can drag a hoard, but a hoard doesn't drag. And then
we have "precincts" -- there's our next metaphor. Suddenly we're talking about
the limits or the boundaries of a city quarter or a house. So we've jumped from
a hoard to a house or a city. We have the "residues" of human materials. What
does this mean? It's sort of an odd expression. Then we talk about
dredging ... Dredging means to go into a river and to crawl through all
the mud in the river and so on and dredge out anything that's left in there.
Well, maybe that works with residues but it doesn't work with any of the other
metaphors. It doesn't really work, certainly not with precincts. How
many people go dredging inside a house let's say? And then we have another
metaphor with "doors." So you can see that it's just a whole series of metaphors
and they just don't work well together. This is the kind of thing that you want
to watch out for in your writing. It's one thing to mix the occasional metaphor,
but if you end up with passages like this, then you know that you've gone
astray. So let that be a warning! There you go. That's it for a mixed
metaphors.