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Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Enliven your communications with WWII metaphors

The history of World War Two, the Nazi rise to power and the career of Adolf Hitler are all rich clay for the fashioning of metaphors. Startling, entertaining, often telling, occasionally tiresome, such metaphors add a distinctive dimension to your communications.

The key is to make your WWII metaphors unexpected and offbeat. No one wants to hear the next likening of some current episode to Chamberlain at Munich. What you want are playful, lighthearted references to WWII episodes and personages that most educated people know of. In a later post, I may offer a list of promising such episodes and personages, but for now, a few examples mined from my own correspondence using Google Desktop searches (just download and install it--you'll wonder where it's been all your life).
  • She is the most self-absorbed person since Hitler! [Camille Paglia]

  • SHOUTING IS NOT USUALLY VERY PERSUASIVE, BUT IT SEEMS TO HAVE WORKED FOR HITLER!!

  • I’d like to see what kind of weaponry our boys would have hit the beaches with back in WWII if [Mariners CEO] Howard Lincoln had been calling the shots. "Our goal is to be competitive with the Germans . . ."

  • Some people seem to love Oceanaire, but many of them seem to be from Minnesota and I just don't trust Midwesterners to tell me about seafood (among other things). I can't really get past the idea that it's from the same people who created Buca di Beppo. I suppose it could be amazing and we could learn to separate them in our minds, as if Hitler had invented the light bulb.
O.K., those examples were a little skewed, but you get the idea. And maybe "metaphor" is too narrow a term. Maybe "reference" would be better.

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posted at 12:37 AM

1 Comments:

Blogger Ueberyak said...

This one always gets the girlies:

"I'm storming your Norman beach, m'lady!"

February 23, 2006 11:14 AM  

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