Synthetic perfumes do a poor job of awakening that connection to green things, according to some natural perfumers. They argue that commercial perfumes can have all the subtlety of the men’s room at Yankee Stadium. And that synthetic fragrances cling indelibly to the body for 12 hours or more, like a one-night stand who demands brunch the next morning.-- from "Making Flowers Into Perfume," by Michael Tortorello, front page, Home Section, Thursday, June 10, 2010.
7 comments:
I remember when the NYT sent reporters to war zones or brought back news about important things. Sigh.
They still do. But he's a garden columnist. Wars aren't his domain.
That's a great metaphor.
Michael, but when we went home together, you said you could drink my fragrance forever. Not the language of the "one-night stand", and your metaphors then undressed me on the first date...
This story doesn't nothing to to bolster sales of fritters and prawns or salvate the ruses of Anglo-American Oil. Sigh.
That's not a metaphor. It's a simile.
http://humanities.byu.edu/rhetoric/Figures/S/simile.htm
Incidentally, the construction to which it belongs is a sentence fragment, a noun clause that is parallel to the "Yankee" clause, serving in both cases as direct object of the verb "argue."
Compare, for example, "they argue that (a) is true and that (b) is also true," where the conjunction "that" introduces the subordinate clauses "(a) is true" and "(b) is also true."
In other words, the fragment belongs in the sentence immediately before it.
By the way, I'm surprised the Times let the Yankee and one-night stand imagery through. They're both disgusting, and there's nothing clever about either one of them.
corrected version
"They argue that commercial perfumes can have all the subtlety of the men’s room at Yankee Stadium and that synthetic fragrances cling indelibly to the body for 12 hours or more, like a one-night stand who demands brunch the next morning."
By the way, as long as we're talking grammar, I'd just like to point out a very minor issue with one sentence in your otherwise excellent June 11 piece.
In the sentence "the damage and destruction caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion has since become the stuff of history," the verb "has" should be "have."
"The damage and destruction (that were) caused by the Deepwater Horizon explosion have since become the stuff of history." (The relative clause before "caused" is understood. I expanded it merely to underscore the agreement issue.)
A one-night stand doesn’t have to be contextualized as a throwaway phrase the way a rich patron tosses riches with no strings attached. The little we know why bother finding doesn’t have to be the predominant result of fit to print, and hard news, doesn’t have to be all bones and no cardiac muscle. Bound by the spastic mission statement to enhance society, writers should not be shedding an unwholesome spotlight on sexual intimacy--the outer margins of decency, explored by the unsexed or the hateful without tentative ambivalence only diverts the insecure reader when they should be hesitant. Whether intentional or not, such instances of pathological contempt for the reader, do nothing to alleviate the demise of the institution as a profitable, sovereign operator. But to the contrary, they illustrate tolerance for rogue voices, unexamined wills, unchallenged hypocrites, in sum, they turn the paper into a guardian of lies, myth, hate and all that derives from such ills, so much so that even when offered the chance to learn how to acquire foresight, how to diagnose obstacles and solve them, how to exceed what it has stated as its own interests, it is bogged down like an imbecile by it’s inability to envision success.
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