An actual writing thread... Dated metaphores and similes.

[ShelbyDawn57]

Working on one of my many stories in my seemingly ever-growing WIP folder and saw this; "Exhausted and wound tighter than a cheap watch, I needed to de-stress."

It made me think that a lot of people today probably have never worn a watch and certainly never one that needed to be wound.

I think the simile still conveys, but it got me to thinking, when does a metaphor or simile become too dated to use? What are some examples? Should we worry about it?

Bring your examples, share your thoughts, toss in random stuff that is sure to derail the thread. Let's have some fun with this and see where it goes. Who knows, we might even figure something useful out in the process...

 

[sijopunk]

"the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" -- William Gibson, the opening line of Neuromancer

 

[sijopunk]

CNN???

I think he meant the grey static color of a channel that wasn't broadcasting. I was really into William Gibson and cyberpunk for a while, and what I heard from other cyberpunk authors who lived in the US when TV was getting popular was that TV channels used to just ... stop broadcasting. And you'd just see static.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I think he meant the grey static color of a channel that wasn't broadcasting. I was really into William Gibson and cyberpunk for a while, and what I heard from other cyberpunk authors who lived in the US when TV was getting popular was that TV channels used to just ... stop broadcasting. And you'd just see static.

Yeah, deleted that. I should probably let someone else derail my thread, right? LOL...

 

[StillStunned]

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home (1979)​

- by Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside –
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

 

[StillStunned]

Sorry, I don't have any of my own to add. Maybe "as smooth as Sade"?

 

[SimonDoom]

Trying to engage in sexual banter with Vivian was like playing a game of Pong, without the charm or nuance.

 

[PennyThompson]

"the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" -- William Gibson, the opening line of Neuromancer

Neil Gaiman (sadly now known to be a sex pest) riffed on this in Neverwhere...

"The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel."

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Trying to engage in sexual banter with Vivian was like playing a game of Pong, without the charm or nuance.

Love that one...Without the charm or nuance...

 

[NotWise]

I wrote somewhere not long ago about using dated idiom. The two female protagonists in Love is Enough are ghosts of prostitutes who died in 1927. Their dialog was peppered with idiom from the 1920's, which I researched pretty extensively.

What I found was that a lot of the dated idiom was very familiar to me. It carried into the 1930's when my parents picked it up, and they passed it down to me. It started me wondering if the language I commonly use was hard for younger people to understand.

I've avoided some idiom since then,. Some is ancient and ingrained in the language. I don't worry too much about those. Other examples are relatively recent but not current. Those are the ones I try to avoid.

 

[CalBishForNow]

No similes/metaphors come to mind, but I've written a lot with exhibitionist/voyeur themes, specifically about characters taking pictures and movies of sexual activity to enjoy later, and I often get hung up on the terms to use. "Film" doesn't seem right, even as a verb, because there's no light-sensitive celluloid involved; it's set in the present day and all digital. Likewise for the noun "video"; one of my characters is probably too young to have had a videocassette in the house, while still being too old to be a college student. The verb "record" would be accurate but sometimes feels too clinical for my characters to use in casual speech, maybe even too clinical for the narrator at times.

I have used all those at various points where they seemed like the least bad option, but I think I use "movie" as a noun and "make a movie" or variations on it as a verb even more often, which I still don't love.

 

[yowser]

Monogamy has more wrinkles than a cerebral cortex.

 

[Andreas_Kreuz]

He could think without the help of a machine.

 

[KittyOfSteele]

"the sky above the port was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" -- William Gibson, the opening line of Neuromancer

That didn't actually age poorly. A dead channel is blue now, so it is a summer's day in still an urban sprawl that's just as dystopian as the nightmare we're living. In fact, I think it's even more comedic, shifting the The Big Sleep energy to a Brave New World vibe.

 

[TheLobster]

“I feel thin, sort of stretched; like too much butter scraped over too little bread.”

(I hope I don’t have to cite where this is from).

 

[StillStunned]

Sounding like a broken record.

 

[TarnishedPenny]

I used this once: Wine glasses thin as my senator’s ethical standards.

Oh, wait. You wanted dated similes. Oops.

 

[SmilingLez]

Working on one of my many stories in my seemingly ever-growing WIP folder and saw this; "Exhausted and wound tighter than a cheap watch, I needed to de-stress."

It made me think that a lot of people today probably have never worn a watch and certainly never one that needed to be wound.

I think the simile still conveys, but it got me to thinking, when does a metaphor or simile become too dated to use? What are some examples? Should we worry about it?

Bring your examples, share your thoughts, toss in random stuff that is sure to derail the thread. Let's have some fun with this and see where it goes. Who knows, we might even figure something useful out in the process...

This is one of my favorite metaphors, "You're a landline in a 5 G world". My favorite simile, "You're like a batamax tape in the digital age."
I use them instead of the traditional "well bless your heart."

 

[BeechLeaf]

This is a thread in a forum.

 

[AG31]

“I feel thin, sort of stretched; like too much butter scraped over too little bread.”

(I hope I don’t have to cite where this is from).

1 - What's dated about this?
2 - If you have too much butter, why would it be thin and stretched? Did you mean "too little butter?"

 

[StillStunned]

1 - What's dated about this?
2 - If you have too much butter, why would it be thin and stretched? Did you mean "too little butter?"

It's from The Fellowship of the Ring, and the actual quote is "like butter over too much bread."

 

[TheLobster]

It's from The Fellowship of the Ring, and the actual quote is "like butter over too much bread."

View attachment 2602502

Yeah, I botched it a little, writing from memory. Turns out it's neither "too much" nor "too little", it's just butter. Bread and butter.

...Okay, now I'm hungry.

 

[StillStunned]

Yeah, I botched it a little, writing from memory. Turns out it's neither "too much" nor "too little", it's just butter. Bread and butter.

...Okay, now I'm hungry.

Back when the movie came out, someone used the quote for how Calista Flockheart would describe herself.

And yes, that memory has been stuck in my brain for 24 years. Who else even remembers who Calista Flockheart is?

 

[SimonDoom]

Back when the movie came out, someone used the quote for how Calista Flockheart would describe herself.

And yes, that memory has been stuck in my brain for 24 years. Who else even remembers who Calista Flockheart is?

The main thing i remember about her is the brevity of her skirts.

 

[TheLobster]

And yes, that memory has been stuck in my brain for 24 years. Who else even remembers who Calista Flockheart is?

I do! I liked Ally McBeal quite a lot, actually.