I've certainly made my share of metaphors in my diary over the years, and here are a few more: * Owning bonds is like picking up nickels in front of a steamroller. * This year has been a period to ...

Can ships and street signs ever mix? Source: iStock; Matthew Barra/Pexels English composition instructors tend to have strong opinions about how the language should be written. You may have been ...

It's one of the basic rules of good writing: Don't mix your metaphors. As reported by the New Republic's Jonathan Chait, Eric Alterman of the Daily Beast provides an illustration of why the rule is so ...

DEAR RICHARD LEDERER: I was listening to a local radio talk show host who described an unexpected event as a “curve ball from left field.” I believe that is called a mixed metaphor. It made me start ...

There’s a method to my partial differential equations. Yang Yang, associate professor of mathematical sciences, uses high-order numerical techniques to solve mathematical models with unbounded ...

This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not ...

As Wall Street plummets, shrinks, crashes, retreats, and melts down into a bear market, analysts and reporters seem uncertain as to which of these metaphors best captures what’s going on. The answer ...

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