Much More Metaphoric Madness: Metaphoric Madness, #3

Metaphors from What you Study

Metaphors from History

Is history his story or her story? Funny quip apart, history is the story of the past, the story of the dead and the gone, the chronicle of all those things that have happened, the study of the events gone by.

Sure, history is littered with hostile and peacetime happenings, episodes and events, wars and battles, victories and defeats, rises and falls, births and deaths.

Turn the pages of history and you see them   overflowing with illustrious incidents of immense importance. Not surprising that it is often said that those who forget history are condemned to repeat it, repeat the mistakes.

The charm is however in the fact that each one of these events and episodes, each war, each battle, each royal and each regal character is an endearing metaphor.

You can imagine now the sheer volume of metaphors history has bequeathed to English and posterity.

Well, Waterloo, Nelson, czar, blitzkrieg and guillotine are only a few among the countless history words that demonstrate the veracity of that mind-boggling estimate. All these wonderful words from history go that extra mile to wear their metaphor masks to perform their roles with elan.

Why, history itself doubles up as a handy everyday metaphor. How often have we heard the shrug "it is all history now"?  How often have we heard vote-seeking politicians exhorting their constituencies to forget history, forgive them and give them a chance? 

So, just like the datelines in history, the bottomline here is simple. Use history as a metaphor for things that are past and just to be forgotten. Or, something that is irrelevant to the present state of affairs or scheme of things.

For instance, you can say this about a reformed offender: "True, he was a hardened criminal, but that is history now."

Find in the following pages, how history words balkanise, byzantine, draconian, gerrymander and Machiavellian transform into daily metaphors.  

Balkanise

A little about the Balkan peninsula here. During the late Nineteenth and the early Twentieth centuries, the Balkan peninsula was divided into a number of mutually hostile territories. So, literally Balkanise means reducing a sovereign territory to the status of that fragmented Balkan peninsula marked by hostilities.

Say divisive forces are trying to Balkanise your country. Or, state that rising Balkanisation is the legacy of the previous government. 

Better still, fighting the divisive forces in your country, coin a catchy political slogan – Balkanise and be damned. Find this interesting usage of Balkanisation in The Economist (4 April 2012). The feature was headlined "The Balkanisation of Britain."

This story began rolling out thus: "Twenty years ago, Yugoslavia was dissolving in blood and the world was gripped by the drama of the siege of Sarajevo. Now, Britons are beginning to contemplate the Balkanisation of the United Kingdom. Absurd? Well,...."

Here is a published example where Balkanisation as a metaphor is extended further to rope in non-nation entities. In www.theangryanalyst.com and in a feature headlined Is the Balkanisation of the Internet inevitable?, find Martin Fluck writing this on 20 September 2013:

"Leading the way is Brazil. Outraged by the US government’s spying on state-owned oil firm Petrobras, it is trying to break from a US centric internet with legislation that will force internet .............

Negotiations are also underway in South America for the deployment of land connections between all nations, and Brazil is planning to lay cable directly to Europe, bypassing the US."

So, as a metaphor, Balkanisation waffles in with the aroma of the sepia-tinted history pages of the Balkans. Thus, when you Balkanise, you not only divide, but create lasting mutual hostilities among the divided.

Better, use Balkanise in its lower case for the right metaphor effect.

Byzantine

The word has a Turkish flavour to it. Literally, it means anything that is related to Byzantium, which is nothing but Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. In fact, Byzantium refers to the eastern Roman empire and the culture it spawned from the Fourth to the Fifteenth centuries.

As a metaphor, use Byzantine as an adjective to mean intricate and complex, tortuous like a labyrinth and rigidly hierarchic like a British colonial war office.

The question now is: how do you use this Byzantine word as an everyday metaphor?

Say the Byzantine bureaucracy of your civic administration puts you off. Or, declare that it is easy to get lost in the Byzantine red-tapes of an immigration and visa-issuing office.

However you use it, the word should unmistakably drive home a sense of intricacy and the imbedded tortuousness. So, use Byzantine to describe the tortuous ways of a government, of a bureaucracy-riddled officialdom.

Find this interesting statement from Winthrop University’s info-laden website faculty.winthrop.edu. by researcher Robert J Stonebraker in his article Not