Hi Tinanam; It "The president rode into office on a tide of discontent" This is a wonderful metaphor, as aonther poster beautifully explained concerning the physical tides of the oceans and seas on earth. Have you seen surfers on

So, there's a thing on the teevee about Palin's book Going Rouge. Around 400 pages, all of it in her own words, everybody's amazed that she's managed to finish something, etc, etc.  Apparently she'd moved her whole family,

Reminds me of a similarly mixed metaphor in a short verse by the famous American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime, And departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands

It comes from William Barrett Travis, the commander at the Battle of the Alamo. How Mr Pedantic uses the reasoning it may not be from there because the Mexicans would then leave is completely nonsensical. Travis drew the line in the sand

Thanks, everybody. Ray H., perhaps the author intended the mysterious metaphor to go unexplained, one more reminder of how Alaska is a "foreign country." I would think a real home-grown expression up there would have something to do with

Thanks for replying Avangi. But except maybe in the outback, almost all Australian households have their bathrooms connected to a local plumbing system to drain the sewege. I think I have misused the word 'metaphorically'. I mean to say

" The Thin Veneer of Civilization The big lesson of Katrina is not about the incompetence of the Bush administration, the scandalous neglect of poor black people in the United States or our unpreparedness for major natural disasters,

"Churn is the American way. Companies are born, rise, fall and die. Others come along to replace them. The country's remarkable capacity for innovation, for reinvention, is tied to its acceptance to failure. Or always has been. Without

New York Times November 14, 1994 Exploring the Links Between Depression, Writers and Suicide By WILLIAM GRIMES When the poet Anne Sexton learned of Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963, she was horrified. "That death was mine," she said.

"Ancient" doesn't tell me. There are many ancient marketplaces still ... have been new back then... or was it already ncient? How many words can I afford to spend on scene description, without a reader thinking that the story's