Silos, slabs and electronic eggs
Metaphors can be useful, but bad ones sound instantly clunky
Metaphors are the stuff of life: they make abstract ideas seem vivid and direct. But when you use metaphors, you need to make sure the thoughts and images fit together seamlessly. Otherwise the results can be ridiculous. A couple of weeks ago, alas, the people in charge of an upcoming Management Forum Conference at McGill University fell victim to a thirst for images. “The program is both exciting and intriguing,” they promised in a widely sent email. But their conference has the unfortunate title “Silos and Slabs: Building the Bridges and Ladders We Need to Succeed.”
If you intend to build a bridge, don’t you need some ladders already in place? And what does a bridge have to do with a silo — an airtight chamber, sometimes above ground ( to store grain), sometimes below ground ( to store missiles)? For that matter, what possible relationship could silos, bridges and ladders have with slabs? Among the common meanings of “slab” are a thick slice of meat, a smooth body of rock, and a table on which dead bodies are laid out. ( I’ll assume McGill didn’t intend one of the lesserknown meanings: a crate of Australian beer with 24 cans or bottles.) If this is what we need to succeed, what would failure look like?
Admittedly, the email goes on to explain the title — sort of. It promises that participants in the conference will learn to “expand our network skills — all to help us better work around the silos and clamber over the slabs that are the hallmarks of a large, complicated and wellestablished institution.” Let’s think about this for a minute. The hallmarks of McGill evidently include slabs ( smooth rocks? dead meat? mortuaries?) and silos ( for wheat or weapons?), and network skills can somehow lead us past them all. These skills, by the way, will be imparted in a ballroom. The day’s fee includes “the closing networking cocktail.” I think the participants will have earned it.
A good metaphor carries no awkwardness in the telling. A bad metaphor, on the other hand, sounds instantly clunky. Consider this one from a recent issue of the Guardian Weekly, normally a haven for good prose: “Apple’s refusal to unlock an iPhone at the behest of the FBI is a reminder of the risks of putting all our electronic eggs in one basket.” Whatever an electronic egg might be, it’s impossible to imagine placing lots of them together in some kind of basket, whether or not the FBI is watching. The sentence betrays an alarming gap between the ideas the writer is trying to express and the actual words on the page.
Before it became associated with slabs and silos, a hallmark was an official stamp that displayed the standard of a gold or silver article. The metaphorical sense — a sign or token of character — emerged long after the literal one. A similar movement occurred with the word “trademark,” which today is often used in a non- literal way: “the trademark boorishness of Donald Trump,” for example. Once trademarks were applied to products and packaging; now they’re applied to people. The singer Kylie Minogue and the “social media star” ( don’t ask) Kylie Jenner are fighting a legal battle over who controls the trademark “Kylie.”
If you think that’s insidious, just wait. What I find truly abhorrent is the way certain people and companies have trademarked whole phrases and ideas. A decade ago, a California grief consultant named Kriss Kevorkian trademarked the expressions “environmental grief ” and “ecological grief;” if you give this ridiculous notion any credence, any time you use one of those phrases, you should follow it by the symbol ® . The arrogance of this is striking: these phrases are made up of common English words that express important ideas, and they were used by other writers long before Kevorkian seized them as her own. She has also coined the word “griefitude.”
God save us all from silos, slabs, bridges, ladders, electronic eggs, social media stars, California grief consultants, and Donald Trump.