Yesterday I talked about metaphors that literally referred to themselves. Alas, in the spirit of humor, I cheated a bit. Most of my examples were truly autophorical, but one was faking it.<\/p>\n
Or as Sally might put it, it’s only autophorical if X=“X”.<\/p>\n
For example, the following was legit:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cI went out on a limb to rescue your cat from that tree.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
because the speaker really did go out on a limb, both literally and metaphorically.<\/p>\n
In fact, my first five examples were all properly autophorical. But the last one wasn’t really kosher:<\/p>\n
\n\u201cThe editor cut my novel to five pages, to make a long story short.\u201d\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The problem here is that the speaker is not using the idiom “to make a long story short”, to talk about the meaning of the sentence (what the editor did), but rather to reference his\/her own statement.<\/p>\n
In fact this last example is kind of a cousin to Tom Swifties<\/a>, which depend on a more traditional idea of punning:<\/p>\n
\n“I have a skin infection,” Tom said rashly.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I talked about metaphors that literally referred to themselves. Alas, in the spirit of humor, I cheated a bit. Most of my examples were truly autophorical, but one was faking it. Or as Sally might put it, it’s only autophorical if X=“X”. For example, the following was legit: \u201cI went out on a limb … Continue reading “Pseudoautophorical”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11313"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11313"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11332,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11313\/revisions\/11332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}