Words and Stuff Johnny Grimond

England’s Deputy Chief Medical Officer has ten sets of initials after his name. Almost all relate to his medical knowledge, which is wide and deep.

Professor Jonathan Van-tam’s fame, however, rests not just on his epidemiological expertise, but on his ability to explain what’s going on. It rests on, in particular, his use of metaphor. Dr Van-tam uses metaphors much more effectively than most politicians.

Take the Prime Minister. He enjoys language and sometimes uses it well. But shown a long ordeal and asked how to cheer us up, he reaches for ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’, which is perhaps the most hackneyed metaphor since Brexit’s elusive ‘level playing field’.

Thus, on 30th December, Mr Johnson orated, ‘We are still in the tunnel of this pandemic. The light, however, is not merely visible: thanks to an extraordinary feat of British engineering, if you like, the tunnel has been shortened and we are moving faster through it.’ Hmph.

Now take Dr Van-tam’s railway analogy, earlier last year. He was on a platform waiting to board a crowded train:

‘It’s wet, it’s windy, it’s horrible. And two miles down the tracks, two lights appear and it’s the train and it’s a long way off and we’re at that point at the moment. That’s the efficacy result.

‘Then we hope the train slows down safely to get into the station; that’s the safety data. And then the train stops.

‘And, at that point, the doors don’t open; the guard has to make sure it’s safe to open the doors. That’s the [Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency], that’s the regulator.

‘And when the doors open, I hope there’s not an unholy scramble for the seats. The [Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation] has very clearly said which people need the seats most and they are the ones who should get on the train first.’ The doctor had us gripped. Politicians can sometimes produce a memorable metaphor: Mao Zedong said atom bombs were paper tigers; Churchill identified the iron curtain; Geoffrey Howe explained how Mrs Thatcher’s opening batsmen had been sent out to the crease with bats broken by their captain.

All these metaphors helped to arouse in the mind of the listener a consciousness of the ideas or events being described. By their very difference from the words expected, metaphors – which in Greek ‘transfer to one word the sense of another’ – can help to make the telling more vivid.

They can also make it more boring. Orwell counselled against using a metaphor we are used to seeing in print: these are clichés. But he did recognise that some metaphors are ‘dead’ and have in effect reverted to being ordinary words.

Dead metaphors would nowadays include ‘landmark rulings’, ‘grinding to a halt’ and perhaps ‘going viral’. I would draw the line – there’s another corpse – at ‘perfect storms’, ‘windows of opportunity’, ‘rollercoasters’ and almost anything ‘toxic’ or ‘iconic’. As for ‘roll out the vaccine’, that is more daft than dead.

Mixed metaphors also attract criticism. I rather enjoy them. It’s best to avoid ‘igniting’, ‘sparking’ or ‘triggering’ tensions, but when the cat is out of the bag and everyone is in the soup, not clover, I think it’s reasonable to smile.

The sin in mixing metaphors is not, after all, in making the mixture but in failing to realise that that’s what you’ve done. The writer to the Times last year who complained, ‘It’s throwing the baby out with the bath water… It’s dumbing down via the back door,’ saw nothing amiss.

Roger Angell, however, knew exactly what he was doing when he described a book as ‘a mélange, a grab bag, a plate of hors d’oeuvres, a teenager’s closet, a bit of everything’. But he wasn’t mixing metaphors, he was simply offering one after another, much as Macbeth was when told of his wife’s death:

‘And all our yesterdays have lighted fools/the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle/life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player/that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/and then is heard no more. It is a tale/told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/signifying nothing.’

Without metaphors, we’d have no Shakespeare. Indeed, we’d have no poetry.