Here’s a handy rule: the smaller the organism, the bigger the simile or metaphor you need to describe it.
This is something I’ve noticed while covering the outbreak of meetings that occurs each November, after the exhaustion of harvest, when farmers’ immune systems are weak and they catch meeting fever. Everyone at these meetings uses similes and metaphors, just as each speaker introduces each session with a bad joke. Similes and metaphors are comparisons people make of one thing to another, to explain it better.
Small life forms seem much more evocative of metaphorical extravagance than big creatures, it seems.
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At a recent hog health seminar, three vets strenuously illustrated their points with similes and metaphors.
One said pigs are “like jugglers.” You hand them one or two diseases to “juggle,” and they do OK. You hand them too many, and they drop their health all over the floor.
Another vet said producers shouldn’t use the pig disease PRRS “as a crutch,” and lean on it too heavily for an explanation of herd health problems.
A third vet described another family of diseases (a metaphor itself) as something that was ready to “pounce” on the herd from “out of the woodwork.” The disease can “tip the balance.” And he said the disease is “your conscience,” there to remind you of your production sins. Three metaphors for one disease.
Why this rhetorical exuberance when it comes to pig diseases, but not for cattle and other big creatures like elk?
Maybe because it’s hard to imagine a microscopic pig-disease organism without describing it as something more exciting.
And probably no one needs a metaphor or simile to understand the situation when you’re being charged by a bloody great bull.
