Today is what I call "carpal tunnel day," where I crank up the classical music, take all the speeches I've deemed worthy of appearing in Vital Speeches and crank them into shape.
The worthiness test is as tangled as Beethoven's mane, and I do hope to articulate it one day. But we publish a lot of stuff I don't agree with.
And occasionally, there's a chance for a laugh.
Like a bombastic speech I'm editing right now, that asserts:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the failure of government schools is a time bomb that has been ticking for a century and a half."
Perhaps when you're talking about a trend that's 150 years old, the hackneyed metaphor of choice isn't the "time bomb," which probably wasn't even invented in 1859.
Eh?
The cliche is used to create a sense of urgency. If the “time bomb” has been ticking for 150 years, and it still hasn’t gone off …? Yawn.
We probably have 150 more years to do something about it, right? What’s the rush?
Are you kidding? It’s almost gotta go off any second now! Get me outta here!
It’s like the very old joke about the guy who walks by a house where another guy is standing on the porch waving a broom around wildly.
“What are you doing?” the passerby says.
“Keeping the elephants away,” the broom man replies.
“Why, there aren’t any elephants within six thousand miles of here.”
“Works pretty good, doesn’t it?”
Hrmmm. I just heard a similar story about a kid who visits a doctor and says he’s snapping to keep the snakes away. Somebody must be trying to tell me something.