On March 7, 1850, Daniel Webster of Massachusetts rose from his seat in the Senate to make what he thought would be the speech of his career. He talked for three and a half hours in support of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay’s “Compromise of 1850,” arguing that it was pointless to oppose slavery in the Southern states, or even to argue against its extension into the new territories in the American Southwest. Webster took the view that plantation owners were entitled to safeguard their property, and even went so far as to advocate a rigorous enforcement of the recently passed fugitive slave statutes.
News of the speech was quickly telegraphed back to Massachusetts, a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Most people in the region were stunned, leading one commentator to say—metaphorically—that the speech had slammed into New England with the fury of a hurricane. Many Bay State luminaries made impassioned attacks on Webster. Horace Mann called the speech “a vile catastrophe.” John Quincy Adams described “the gigantic intellect, the envious temper, the ravenous ambition, and the rotten heart of Daniel Webster.” And Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous New Englander of the time, wrote:
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster
sounds like the word love in the mouth of a courtesan.
After Emerson shared the analogy with a few friends, it quickly began to be whispered throughout New England. As often happens, the quotation got simplified as it was passed along, and most people were just as likely to hear it this way:
The word liberty in the mouth of Mr. Webster
is like the word love in the mouth of a whore.
The impact was dramatic. With his political base in shambles, Webster resigned three months later. Almost immediately, historians began to refer to “the speech that lost a Senate seat.” What they generally fail to mention, however, is the role that a few critical and insulting remarks—and one spectacular anaogy—played in the process.
Disparaging remarks are such a staple of life that we hear them every day without recognizing that so many of them are metaphorical. As a child, I routinely heard people question the sanity of others by saying things like he’s got a screw loose or she has bats in the belfry. And over the years an entire class of idiomatic expressions—all metaphorical—have been created to describe a deficiency of intelligence:
He doesn’t have all his marbles.
She’s not playing with a full deck.
He’s one brick short of a load.
She’s a few grapes short of a bunch.
The elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top.
The stairs don’t go all the way up to the attic.
The lights are on, but there’s nobody home.
The political arena has been filled with memorable metaphorical insults. In 1897, Theodore Roosevelt, a thirty-nine-year-old assistant secretary of the Navy, was itching for the United States to rid the Western hemisphere of European colonialism, particularly Spain’s involvement in Cuba. The hawkish Roosevelt believed a powerful show of force was required, but President William McKinley favored a diplomatic approach to the problem. In a rare display of candor from a junior official in any presidential administration, Roosevelt said of McKinley:
He shows all the backbone of a chocolate éclair.
In April 1898, shortly after the sinking of the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana harbor, Congress declared war on Spain. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Roosevelt, who quickly resigned his post and eagerly volunteered for action. Within weeks, Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt transformed a collection of college athletes, cowboys, policemen, and miners into a fighting group that went on to achieve lasting glory as the Rough Riders. Roosevelt was lionized in the American press, and his status as a war hero guaranteed a successful political future. In 1900, despite his many qualms about McKinley, Roosevelt was persuaded to become the vice-presidential running mate. They won the election, of course, and after McKinley’s assassination in 1901, Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States, the youngest man, at age forty-two, to serve in the office.
As president, Roosevelt continued to use metaphors about backbone and spine, believing they were great shorthand terms for courage (or the lack of it). In another example, he said of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:
I could carve out of a banana
a justice with more backbone than that.
The theatrical and entertainment world is filled with magnificent metaphorical insults. Many come from critics, whose reviews have contained some real gems:
She was good at playing abstracted confusion
in the same way a midget is good at being short.
He played the King as though under the momentary apprehension
that someone else was about to play the Ace.
Her voice sounded like an eagle being goosed.
Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else’s dirty water.
Sometimes the recipients of reviews have fired back in similar ways, as when the American playwright David Mamet described two influential critics this way:
Frank Rich and John Simon are
the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theater.
Metaphorical insults are generally directed at people, but every now and then, we come across examples of what might be called impersonal invective:
Like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.
A war between architecture and painting
in which both come out badly maimed.
A monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend.
Analogies and metaphors can be used to deliver compliments as well as insults. Garrison Keillor once said that Alfred Kinsey was to sex what Columbus was to geography. In his 2001 Jazz documentary, filmmaker Ken Burns said of Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong:
Armstrong is to music what Einstein is to physics
and the Wright Brothers are to travel.
And Nunnally Johnson offered this tribute to Marilyn Monroe:
She is a phenomenon of nature,
like Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon.
You can’t talk to it. It can’t talk to you.
All you can do is stand back and be awed by it.
Sometimes the compliments have a double-edged quality, as when John Mason Brown said of Dorothy Parker:
To those she did not like, she was a stiletto made of sugar.
More metaphorical compliments can be found in other chapters of the book, but in the remainder of this chapter you will find only examples of words being used as weapons—and all will be expressed metaphorically.
A beautiful palace without central heating.
According to Luce’s biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, this was a popular saying about Luce. If you know a great beauty—or a handsome man—who lacks warmth and sensitivity, you won’t find a better metaphorical insult.
A one-man slum.
Broun was a rotund man who was notorious for his disheveled appearance. He was once described this way, and it followed him for the rest of his life.
The glittering structure of her cultivation sits on her novels
like a rather showy icing that detracts from the cake beneath.
America is an adorable woman chewing tobacco.
Bartholdi was a nineteenth-century French sculptor who loved America but was turned off by its citizens’ disgusting personal habits, especially tobacco chewing. His most famous work, a statue he titled Liberty Enlightening the World, was a mouthful for everyday Americans, who since 1886 have informally referred to it by the name it has today: the Statue of Liberty. Another European aesthete who loved Americans but detested tobacco chewing—and the spitting associated with it—was Oscar Wilde. The practice inspired his famous metaphorical remark, “America is one long expectoration.”
His mind had one compartment for right and one for wrong,
but no middle chamber where the two could commingle.
This is an extaordinary description of a black-and-white thinker by a respected twentieth-century historian who wrote insightfully about many American leaders. Jackson, like so many either-or thinkers, was also stubborn—a characteristic also captured by Beale: “He could bear insult, personal danger, obloquy; but he could not yield his point.”
Her singing reminds me of a cart coming downhill with the brake on.
She has a face that belongs to the sea and the wind,
with large rocking-horse nostrils,
and teeth that you just know bite an apple every day.
Getting kicked out of the American Bar Association
is like getting kicked out of the Book-of-the-Month Club.
This was Belli’s clever way of saying “no big deal” to American Bar Association president Walter Craig, who suggested that Belli’s membership in the ABA might be revoked when Belli made intemperate and unprofessional remarks after his client Jack Ruby was convicted of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald. Belli, the flamboyant “king of torts,” had described the Dallas trial as “the biggest kangaroo-court disgrace in the history of American law.”
His mind was like a Roquefort cheese,
so ripe that it was palpably falling to pieces.
Ricardo Montalban is to improvisational acting
what Mount Rushmore is to animation.
Why refer to an actor as wooden or stiff when you can say something like this?
He occasionally stumbled over the truth,
but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
He is the only bull that brings his own china shop with him.
This is a clever alteration of bull in a china shop, which means being clumsy or reckless in situations that call for grace or delicacy. Churchill used it to describe the performance of U. S. Secretary of State Dulles in the post-World War II years.
Listening to the Fifth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams
is like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.
Toward the end of her life she looked like a hungry insect
magnified a million times—a praying mantis that had forgotten how to pray.
He festooned the dung heap on which he had placed himself with sonnets
as people grow honeysuckle around outdoor privies.
A day away from Tallulah is like a month in the country.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
This is how the line is usually presented, but the full original passage is even more interesting. As Mr. and Mrs. Irwine discuss Mrs. Poyser, he says: “Her tongue is like a new-set razor. She’s quite original in her talk, too; one of those untaught wits that help to stock a country with proverbs. I told you that capital thing I heard her say about Craig—that he was like a cock, who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow. Now, that’s an Aesop’s fable in a sentence.”
The Love Machine is a far better book than Valley (of the Dolls)…
It is still, to be sure, not exactly a literary work.
But in its own little sub-category…
it shines, like a rhinestone in a trash can.
He looks like the guy in a science-fiction movie
who is the first to see the Creature.
He’s like a man who sits on a stove
and then complains that his backside is burning.
Despite their remarkable creative partnership, Gilbert and Sullivan had a rocky personal relationship. Gilbert made this comment after Sullivan had complained that Gilbert’s skill as a librettist didn’t match his as a composer.
Bambi with testosterone.
This appeared in Entertainment Weekly in 1990. In 1986, Boy George said of Prince: “He looks like a dwarf who’s been dipped in a bucket of pubic hair.”
He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew when he pleas’d he could whistle them back.
He talks so fast that listening to him is like
trying to read Playboy magazine with your wife turning the pages.
Freud is the father of psychoanalysis. It had no mother.
This, from Greer’s 1971 The Female Eunuch, is one of the twentieth century’s most sophisticated insults. Feminists long quarreled with Freud, believing that psychoanalysis was a giant edifice built around a male-dominated view of the world. But it wasn’t until this observation that a female voice grasped the concept that the most effective counterattack was not with anger but with wit.
A very weak-minded fellow I am afraid, and, like the feather pillow,
bears the marks of the last person who has sat on him.
His speech was rather like being savaged by a dead sheep.
Healy said this in a House of Commons debate in 1978. In his 1989 memoir he said the comment “was an adaptation of Churchill’s remark that an attack by Attlee was ‘like being savaged by a pet lamb.’” Nobody else recalls Churchill’s remark (although he once did describe Attlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”).
If ignorance ever goes to $40 a barrel,
I want drilling rights on George Bush’s head.
That man’s ears make him look like a taxi-cab with both doors open.
He was to ordinary male chauvinist pigs what Moby Dick was to whales.
A grenade with the pin pulled.
The trouble with Senator Long is that he
is suffering from halitosis of the intellect.
Ickes was FDR’s Secretary of the Interior. His best-known quip came in 1939, just after the thirty-seven-year-old Thomas Dewey announced his intention to become the Republican presidential nominee: “Dewey has thrown his diaper into the ring.”
Calling George Bush shallow is like calling a dwarf short.
Ivins said this about the elder Bush in 1990, but she wouldn’t have quibbled with anyone who applied it to George W. Bush. In 1999, she wrote about him: “If you think his daddy had trouble with ‘the vision thing,’ wait’ll you meet this one.”
Arnold Schwarzenegger looks like a condom full of walnuts.
As a work of art, it has the same status as
a long conversation between two not very bright drunks.
The poet of junk food and pop culture.
The biggest bug in the manure pile.
This little flower, this delicate little beauty, this cream puff…
He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.
The Christian Coalition has no more to do with Christianity
than the Elks Club has to do with large animals with antlers.
The Canadian comedian Robin Tyler offered a related analogy: “Fundamentalists are to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.”
She looked as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth—
or anywhere else.
A cold bitch might be used today, but Lanchester excelled in the art of analogy. If her full meaning is not apparent, or anywhere else suggests frigidity.
Jimmy Carter as president is like Truman Capote marrying Dolly Parton.
The job is too big for him.
The idea of a job being too big for someone has never been better described. Don Rickles was thinking similarly when he said, “Eddie Fisher married to Elizabeth Taylor is like me trying to wash the Empire State Building with a bar of soap.”
He looks just like the little man on the wedding cake.
Mrs. Longworth, the colorful daughter of Theodore Roosevelt, became such a fixture in our nation’s capital in the mid-1900s that she was called “Wash-ington’s other monument.” She made this remark during the 1948 presidential race, when Dewey was heavily favored to defeat Harry S Truman. Once the remark was made, many voters couldn’t get the image out of their minds—Dewey, with his pencil-thin mustache and formal demeanor, did look as stiff as the groom figures seen on wedding cakes. How many votes did it cost Dewey? Enough to give Truman the surprise victory, which he celebrated by hoisting a Chicago Tribune with the famously wrong headline: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.
Though I yield to no one in my admiration for Mr. Coolidge,
I do wish he did not look as if he had been weaned on a pickle.
Mrs. L. heard this remark from her doctor, and even though she went to great lengths to credit him, the saying is almost always attributed to her.
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich.
It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
Macaulay added: “When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but while he remained on a lower region, he outstripped all competitors.”
You know, the French remind me a little bit
of an aging actress of the 1940s who was still trying
to dine out on her looks but doesn’t have the face for it.
When France failed to support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, many American politicians fired rhetorical shots at our former ally. Another insulting analogy came from Jed Babbin, a former deputy undersecretary of defense in the first Bush administration. Appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball in January 2003, he said, “You know, frankly, going to war without France is like going deer hunting without an accordion. You just leave a lot of useless noisy baggage behind.”
She is closer to organized prostitution than anything else.
A pile of shit in a silk stocking.
The triumph of sugar over diabetes.
The Englishman has all the qualities of a poker except its occasional warmth.
The lighthouse in a sea of absurdity.
The air currents of the world never ventilated his mind.
Page, an early Wilson supporter, was rewarded with an appointment as ambassador to Great Britain in 1913. He became disenchanted with Wilson’s policy of neutrality in the early years of World War I. While he was pleased when the United States entered the war in 1917, he never again supported Wilson. The line perfectly describes many contemporary Americans who have taken love of country a little too far. They fold up the American flag and wrap it around their eyes like a blindfold, making them virtually immune to international influence.
A vacuum with nipples.
Also speaking about Monroe, Billy Wilder said: “The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all or one of the greatest Dupont products ever invented. She has breasts like granite and a brain like Swiss cheese, full of holes.”
He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt.
He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.
Many books and Web sites continue to mistakenly report that Henry Clay was the target of this legendary metaphorical insult. John F. Kennedy even got it wrong in his 1957 book Profiles in Courage (where he described the line as “the most memorable and malignant sentence in the history of personal abuse”). Randolph, who was hailed by William Safire as the recognized “master of American political invective,” said it about Edward Livingston, a former New York City mayor who had been elected to Congress. In 1998, Bill Weld, the ex-federal prosecutor and former governor of Massachusetts, titled his first novel Mackerel by Moonlight. Appropriately, it was a tale of political corruption.
He is to acting what Liberace was to pumping iron.
Most of the time, Brando sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet paper.
If a swamp alligator could talk, it would sound like Tennessee Williams.
I was particularly stunned by the casting of Cruise, who is no more
my Vampire Lestat than Edward G. Robinson is Rhett Butler.
Rice said this in 1993, shortly after the announcement that Cruise would play the Vampire Lestat in a film adaptation of her 1974 novel, Interview With a Vampire. After screening the film a year later, Rice was so captivated by Cruise’s performance that she recanted her position in a full-page ad she took out in the trade newspaper Variety. In a later interview, she replaced her insulting analogy with a complimentary one: “I like to believe Tom’s Lestat will be remembered the way Olivier’s Hamlet is remembered.”
Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
In 1988, three years before becoming Texas governor, Richards delivered this line in an address at the Democratic National Convention. The remark, an alteration of the metaphor about being born with a silver spoon in one’s mouth, was a two-fisted jab—referring to Bush’s elocution difficulties as well as his privileged background. On this latter point, Democrats in Texas were fond of saying about Bush: “He was born on third base and thought he got there by hitting a triple.”
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails,
with here and there an also dropped hammer.
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
Miss Streisand looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat
surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.
Miss Garland’s figure resembles
the giant-economy-size tube of toothpaste in girls’ bathrooms:
squeezed intemperately at all points, it acquires a shape
that defies definition by the most resourceful solid geometrician.
Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum
with insufficient flying buttresses.
Rigg is best-known for playing Mrs. Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers. Simon’s remark became popular in part because of its similarity to a simile American men have long used to describe buxom women: built like a brick shithouse.
He not only overflowed with learning, but stood in the slop.
Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan—a Mount Rushmore of incompetence.
His mind was like a soup dish, wide and shallow;
it could hold a small amount of nearly anything,
but the slightest jarring spilled the soup into somebody’s lap.
Reading him is like wading through glue.
A louse in the locks of literature.
The bosom friend of senators and congressmen
was about as daring as an early Shirley Temple movie.
A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg
that looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
Twain wrote this about a passenger who, in the middle of an 1867 Atlantic Ocean crossing, asked the captain if the ship was going to come to a halt on Sundays.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket,
and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere.
Twain formed his own publishing company in 1885 and appointed Charles L. Webster, his nephew by marriage, as president. Twain never had much respect for Webster and forced him out of the company three years later. The complete passage in which I found this observation is a metaphorical tour de force. It may even have stimulated the popular expression about engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed person. The full passage can be found at: www.metaphoramor.com.
Donald Trump’s hair is to coiffure what Ashton Kutcher is to dramatic acting.
Froth at the top, dregs at bottom, but the middle excellent.
Audrey Hepburn is the patron saint of anorexics.
The unpleasant sound Bush is emitting as he traipses from one
conservative gathering to another is a thin, tinny arf—the sound of a lap dog.
Former president George H. W. Bush was also the recipient of an insulting dog analogy. In the late 1980s, Mike Royko wrote, “He has the look about him of someone who might sit up and yip for a Dog Yummie.”
Little Truman had a voice so high it could only be detected by a bat.
Williams was referring to Capote’s high-pitched voice. On Capote’s writing ability, Katherine Anne Porter was not as generous, calling him “the pimple on the face of American literature.”
With a pig’s eyes that never look up,
with a pig’s snout that loves muck,
with a pig’s brain that knows only the sty,
and a pig’s squeal that cries only when he is hurt,
he sometimes opens his pig’s mouth, tusked and ugly,
and lets out the voice of God,
railing at the whitewash that covers the manure about his habitat.
An improbable creature, like a human giraffe,
sniffing down his nostrils at mortals beneath his gaze.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell is an aged British battleship sinking rapidly
and firing every available gun on her rescuers.
A hyena in syrup.
This extraordinary insult first surfaced in a 1972 Time magazine article on Walters. The piece cleverly described her this way: “Barbara is alternately breathy and brittle, cool and aggressive. Her technique is a model, to some observers, of what makes an interview great; to others, of what makes an interview grate.” The legendary Russian poet found her grating.