From the category archives:

Metaphor Man

Reframing the Ordinary with Metaphors

by Michael Erard April 22, 2013 Framer Reads the News

There are some ordinary things in life that you think don’t need a metaphor. But once you hear the metaphor, it helps you see the ordinary in a whole new way. I found two cases that recently floated across my social media radar that are not only presented well, but are also immediately evident in [...]

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The Wedginess of Communicating Statistics

by Michael Erard February 14, 2013 Framer Reads the News

You may have noticed that scientists – as well as other professionals – frequently point to, write, talk, think about, and argue in terms of graphs, charts, and other visualizations of data. Sometimes, these visualizations are complex enough that they need to be explained, and in some cases, those explanations themselves give shape to the [...]

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The Defenseless Metaphor: Pyramid of Life

by Michael Erard July 21, 2011 Metaphor Man

If Metaphor Man were a real superhero, surely one of his tasks would be to deliver justice on behalf of misused metaphors. One such metaphor, the “pyramid of life,” was unfairly maligned in a New York Times editorial on Tuesday about predator-prey relationships in the animal world. “Like most simple metaphors, this one has a perceptual [...]

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Metaphor Man: Comments on David Brooks’ metaphor column

by Michael Erard April 15, 2011 Metaphor Man

New York Times columnist David Brooks recently promoted the importance of metaphor in his April 11th column. “Metaphors are not rhetorical frills at the edge of how we think,” Brooks wrote, “They are at the very heart of it.” To anyone who has learned and uses Strategic Frame Analysis and who has come to share [...]

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Metaphor Man: “A Wall Between Church and State”

by Michael Erard November 11, 2010 Metaphor Man

The debates in this most recent election cycle about the separation of church and state, and its presence or lack thereof in the Constitution, caused Metaphor Man to notice this comment on the Talking Points Memo blog. It traces the history of the metaphor of the wall separating church and state. This metaphor is attributed [...]

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Metaphor Man: Mixing Metaphors

by Michael Erard October 1, 2010 Metaphor Man

Colin Powell’s name recently crossed Metaphor Man’s email inbox, after his appearance on “Meet the Press” in which he was accused by Politico of “mixing his metaphors.”  What Powell said, verbatim, is this: “[T]he President … has to, I think, shift the way in which he has been doing things. I think the American people [...]

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Metaphor Man: Elena Kagan, Judges and Umpires

by FrameWorks Institute August 10, 2010 Metaphor Man

Are your issues sinking in abstractions? Are the complexities as clear as mud? Do your simplifying models need traction? At FrameWorks, Metaphor Man helps to build simplifying models that work, so that framers can use them to communicate the essence of an issue — and on this blog, he’ll write about metaphors in the wild, [...]

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