Wrestling with a bad metaphor
Carl Philips, Brian Guenzel and Paul Bergen are hopping mad about bad metaphors. Writing in the Journal of Harm Reduction, they pull on their imaginary boxing gloves.
Stepping into the ring, so to speak, they declare: “Anti-harm-reduction advocates sometimes resort to pseudo-analogies to ridicule harm reduction. Those opposed to the use of smokeless tobacco as an alternative to smoking sometimes suggest that the substitution would be like jumping from a three-storey building rather than a 10-storey, or like shooting yourself in the foot rather than the head.”
Following their summary of these two disagreeable analogies, Philips, Guenzel and Bergen proceed to administer a good thrashing….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.