Bad Analogies
At the moment there are at least two tools of language and writing whose abuse puzzles and irritates me substantially, perhaps out of proportion to logic, but there you go.
One is stupid puns, by which I mean a punning word drawn against its will into a sentence because it might sound somewhat like another word but which resulting pun introduces no new meaning or hidden humor into the utterance. Stupid puns are, of course, much beloved of newspaper headline writers. Now, many people tend to express with groans their opinion that any pun is a stupid pun but I disagree. Good puns can add needed levity at the same time they do the work of poetic metaphors, adding simultaneous layers of meaning and understanding to a subject.
The second problem area: stupid, unthinking analogies. These are similes hastily grabbed by unthinking writers and speakers who feel the need to be literary and take hold of any passing analogy with the barest superficial similarity to their subject. Unfortunately, although the analogous thing might be the right size, or shape, or color, or taste, it doesn't operate in any way or shape that lends any meaning to the subject being analogized. (Perhaps you see the similarity to the stupid pun, so perhaps there's really only one larger concept involved in this peeve of mine.)
Or worse, the analogous properties are wrong or inverted, leading the reader into confusion and wandering away from reading the text while trying to puzzle out the perplexities of the faulty analogy. The following was the first sentence of a piece I never finished reading.
Hollywood heavy hitters often weigh prestige on a bathroom scale – which may explain why movers and shakers are constantly chasing the latest in trendy diets.
[Susan Campos, "Hollywood Scales it Down", Huffington Post, 5 May 2010.]
How interesting. Prestige is treated as a physical object, a substance with mass that can be measured on a bathroom scale, perhaps at the same time as the vain "heavy hitter"–heavy with more prestige as indicated by a higher reading on the scale, no doubt–weighs himherself to check on just how heavy hisher hitting currently is.
Alas, it turned out that the interest of the author of the subject analogy was interested in those "heavy" hitters' claimed obsession with diets. Thus, further exposition makes plain that prestige, if it is to be weighed on the bathroom scale, is more associated with something having negative weight, or buoyancy, for the "heavy hitter" because less weight is more attractive, or something like that. As I said I didn't read any further; with so much confusion in the first sentence I didn't have high hopes for more clarity and insight from further reading.
Sometimes I think that perhaps a license should be required to use literary devices.