From the Holy Grail (qv) to Pandora’s Box. Pandora’s Box has mutated. When Pandora opened her box, the evils flew out and could not be put back in. All that […]
Metaphor watch
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: Holy Grail
The Holy Grail (COD) is the cup or platter used by Christ at the Last Supper, and in which St Joseph of Arimathea received Christ’s blood. As such, it is […]
Neville Goodman’s Metaphor Watch: The magic bullet
The expression magic bullet is due to the German medical scientist Paul Ehrlich, who was seeking a cure for syphilis. He wanted to find chemical substances with specific affinity for […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Low hanging cherries
To cherry pick is to choose selectively. It’s supposed to originate from the way cherry pickers select the ripest, unblemished cherries to pick; why cherries rather than apples, oranges, or […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Blind alleys and wrong trees
Research is difficult. Long hours in the laboratory, or tedious hours in the clinic, guarantee nothing. There are lots of blind alleys, dead ends, cul-de-sacs, false trails, wild goose chases, […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Powerhouses and workhorses
The mitochondrion was termed the “powerhouse of the cell” in a Scientific American article in 1957 by Philip Siekevitz, who died in 2009. I suspect that anyone with biological knowledge […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Call a spade a tool
Between 1975 and 2010, the prevalence of the word tool or tools in PubMed increased six-fold, to more than 3% of all PubMed articles. If you’re writing about a spade, […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: Literally a metaphor
We use metaphor, a figure of speech, to explain or enliven: in doing so we write metaphorically, or figuratively. The opposite of metaphorically is literally. We don’t need to add […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: More misunderstood science, some usefully
Staying with astrophysics (qv), let’s think about dark matter and light years. As the Wikipedia entry states, “Dark matter is a hypothetical kind of matter that cannot be seen with […]
Neville Goodman’s metaphor watch: other sciences, other images
PubMed accesses primarily the MEDLINE database of articles written about the life sciences but other sciences are represented too, even astrophysics. The first article turned up by searching black hole […]