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"mixed metaphor"
Definition: A succession of incongruous or ludicrous comparisons. See What Is a Mixed Metaphor?
Examples:
- "There was no time, Acting Chairman Matthew F. McHugh (D-N.Y.) said last week, and the committee was tired of stoking public outrage with fortnightly gobbets of scandal. It decided to publish everything it had left, warts and all. Now everyone is tarred with the same ugly brush, and the myth that forever simmers in the public consciousness--that the House shelters 435 parasitic, fat-cat deadbeats--has received another shot of adrenalin.
(Washington Post, 1992)
- "Mr. Strauss-Kahn told the French National Assembly yesterday: 'Today everyone should know that Credit Lyonais is on its feet again; far from being garroted it is freed from the sword of Damocles that was weighing on its shoulders.'"
(Financial Times, cited in The New Yorker, Jan. 4, 1999)
- "A lot of success early in life can be a real liability--if you buy into it. Brass rings keep getting suspended higher and higher as you grow older. And when you grab them, they have a way of turning into dust in your hands. Psychologists ... have all kinds of words for this, but the women I know seem to experience it as living life with a gun pointed to their heads. Every day brings a new minefield of incipient failure: the too-tight pants, the peeling wallpaper, the unbrilliant career."
(Judith Warner, The New York Times, April 6, 2007)
- "Dick Cheney is a lioness protecting America’s cubs from the laughing hyenas of the left while the poachers of Internationalism sharpen their guns. Knives! Stupid!"
(Stephen Colbert, in a "Battle of the Metaphors" on The Colbert Report, April 19, 2007)
- "French grievances were vented in alternating waves of liberation and repression that swept the overwrought masses toward the cauldron of anarchy."
(Richard Kluger, Seizing Destiny, 2007)
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