Number 28
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It's like English with a rapidly mushrooming drug simile jones. I've been noticing these popular drug similes for years.
The newer drug references assume at least an indirect, abstract familiarity with varied drug states, which have become part of the pool of shared culture. Interesting that we never hear protests from the anti-drug crowd (although a recovering coke head of my slight acquaintance once complained about the brand name "Coca Cola" ~ he thought the name should be outlawed; he couldn't handle it). The usual suspecters must be dozing ~ not enough caffeine. We don't even hear anyone saying, "What? What'd he say? What's that mean? I don't get it." Everyone gets it, because practically everyone does it, or does something.
Drug metaphors are not new. References to inebriation are at least as old as Homer's wine-dark sea, though that metaphor refers to color, not a psychochemical state. But which wine looks like a dark sea, and is it day or night, clear or overcast, stormy or calm? Depends on whether you're drinking red or white.
I'm trying to think of similar tobacco references, but "smoke-filled room", for example, simply means a room full of smoke and smokers. Someone once said to me that tobacco made his thinking "more linear", but I haven't heard that idea dropped into common usage. "It's like a séance on nicotine"? I kind of like it, but what could it mean?
I worked for an editor once who drank literally about a dozen cups of coffee a day. Her hands looked like a manicure on a mega-caffeine diet ~ nails chewed down to the quick.
We expect children to get buzzed on sugar, so there isn't that element of exaggeration or surprise in "like a kid on Twinkies", but how about "like a nun with a sugar and chocolate buzz"?
Perhaps the states induced by everyday drugs are considered to be so normal as to be unrecognizable as altered states, so they haven't entered the language in the same way.
Remember the debate ~ still current, I believe ~ about teaching children to read phonetically or by memorizing the shapes of words? It always seemed logical to me that it's much easier to memorize 26 letters, even though there are variations in pronunciation of some of them, than to memorize all the words in the English language. What must have happened is that someone observed that we do memorize word shapes, and then created a theory about learning the shapes, probably deciding it was more "natural" or something than memorizing symbols. But after all, the language was built on those symbols. You might as well go ahead and learn Chinese if you're going to memorize patterns.
Remember Earth Shoes? They are definitely still around. Anne Kalso, the originator, came up with the design after noticing that when people walk on sand or soft ground, their heels sink down lower than the front of the foot ~ and voila! The Earth Shoe was conceived. The shoe replicates that position, lower heel, etc. But we don't walk on soft ground or sand all that much. Wouldn't it have made more sense to construct a sole filled with sand? I tried on one of those shoes when a friend of mine bought a pair to try to soothe her aching feet. They were stiff as a board. Of course, my idea of a comfortable shoe is a big sponge with straps.
Just because certain configurations occur during or after a particular process, that doesn't mean the brain or the foot should freeze in that configuration to facilitate the process. Kalso could have become enlightened in contemplation of someone hiking down a mountain, for example. Perhaps that's how the wedgie was invented.
Spike Lee is suing to prevent Viacom from renaming TNN "Spike TV". He's laying claim to the word "Spike" and, since Spike TV is to be a men's channel, also to his personal, proprietary, uniquely aggressive qualities, the macho 'tude that the channel wishes to project in its programming. But you can't copyright an idea, nor presumably a personality. The judge has ruled, so far, that a celebrity can claim a unique name, but Spike Lee is not the first person with that nickname. What about Spike Jones? OK, so he's not around anymore, but I bet he was more widely known than Lee. Maybe Lee started out swiping the persona of a goofy musician, but got sidetracked. I'd go for a goofy music cable channel.
"The Blair Bitch Project" had a couple of obvious editing errors, but "Should everyone get a high school or college diploma or a job and promotion on the country's most famous newspaper just for showing up and wanting it real bad?" was not one of them. I used the ungrammatical "real bad" purposely; this is how my students and the young Times reporters want things. As for the real errors, my proofreader was asleep. Literally.
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