Friday, August 11, 2006

Something lacking in the metaphor

From the first paragraph of "NYC professor promotes urban fish farm" by AP writer Karen Matthews [all emphases below added]:
NEW YORK - In the basement of an ivy-covered building on the surprisingly leafy campus of Brooklyn College is something even more surprising: thousands of tilapia packed tighter than a subway car into 300-gallon fiberglass fish tanks.

The metaphor is incomplete. What is the subway car packed with?

Another poor metaphor: "Schreibman, a genial 70-year-old in Birkenstocks and a Hawaiian shirt, didn't set out to be the Johnny Appleseed of tilapia."

Johnny Appleseed (really John Chapman), from what I can remember, planted trees far and wide in the Midwest. Martin Schreibman of Brooklyn College seems to be going no further than the school's basement.

Matthews tries to spice up her piece about tilapia in Brooklyn with some metaphors, but they are ill-conceived and incomplete. That's too bad, because the subject matter is interesting enough on its own.

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