{"id":1667,"date":"2022-02-08T12:38:29","date_gmt":"2022-02-08T17:38:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/?p=1667"},"modified":"2022-02-08T12:55:02","modified_gmt":"2022-02-08T17:55:02","slug":"metaphors-of-the-month-silly-love-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2022\/02\/08\/metaphors-of-the-month-silly-love-songs\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphors of the Month! Silly Love Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bryan<\/a><\/p>\n

Happy Valentines Day. Will you be my Valentine? That itself is metaphor, and you can read about the actual Saint(s) Valentine here<\/a>. Warning: you will find a severed head in that box of chocolates.<\/p>\n

Out of curiosity, and a desire for a week to avoid writing about academic language, I decided to have a bit of fun with love-song metaphors. I ate a lot of saccharine (another metaphor) to give you folks the most overused figures of speech for love and lovers out there.<\/p>\n

They say the world is full of silly love songs. So what’s wrong with that? I need to know. I pick on Boomer-Generation artists here, mostly. I don’t listen to formulaic contemporary pop, preferring Americana, indie rock, or old punk and glam. The other type of music I like, electronica, has no words so no metaphors can be found.<\/p>\n

Love-and-lover metaphors from Country and Western music (those two types of music played at Bob’s Country Bunker in The Blues Brothers<\/em>) merit an entire post. I’ll be walking the floor and walking the line over that subject in a year.<\/p>\n

Love as controlled substance, and more:<\/strong> Maybe you have been drunk with love, but if you listen to Bryan Ferry, pictured up top, you will find a number of rather disturbing metaphors. The decidedly louche crooner remains one of my favorite musicians, but really. In Ferry’s lyrics, one can be a slave to love, and love is the drug, of course, prescribed and dispensed by his and David Stewart’s “Goddess of Love.”<\/p>\n

Come to think of it, a person can have a “bad case of loving you,” and the Doctor of Love can “give you the pill.” That’s right, kids, just call Doctor Love. He is not a mental-health professional, clearly. When Bryan Ferry cries out “love me madly,” there is no cure. That makes sense, if you’ve known someone made insane by love.<\/p>\n

Now we are really off to the races (the heart races, naturally) in an open car with Love, who is a stranger, after all. Love hurts, love binds, love wounds, love shines, love is painful (it really hurts a lot) until love is lost. Up to that sad point, one becomes a prisoner of love or a victim of love because love is a battlefield. If you survive, you are singed, because love is like a flame. It burns you when it’s hot.<\/p>\n

Love birds provide a gentler metaphor where two hearts beat as one. But wait, we have a bunch more hearts to deal with here. Deep in your heart of gold (Neil Young is still searching for one) you may find a change of heart, and that brings us to all the following metaphors for the embers of love’s once-bright flames, as love grows cold.<\/p>\n

Broken Hearts, Etc:<\/strong> I will give Janis Joplin a break because 1) She’s dead and 2) “Piece of My Heart” remains such a great song.\u00a0 Yet the end of a loving relationship, when “you’ve lost that loving feeling,” spawns its own series of cliches (remember: all cliches once were fresh). Love can make one heartsick, or hearts can be stepped on. It’s a matter of the heart, you know, so stop dragging my heart around. A cold-hearted lover may have a heart of stone. Hearts can be given away and not returned.<\/p>\n

Maybe that is why Warren Zevon, who has more than earned a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, goes out “searching for a heart,” one of his finest songs that somehow makes an old subject sound new, as he moves from a tired cliche to some interesting similes,\u00a0 noting “They say love conquers all \/ You can’t start it like a car \/ You can’t stop it with a gun.”\u00a0 \u00a0I suppose in time those similes might become cliched, too. Or maybe not. Zevon and R.E.M. teamed up as The Hindu Love Gods for a single release, and I don’t see anyone imitating the work from that one-off experiment.<\/p>\n

Love Light:<\/strong>\u00a0 I saved the most overused for last. We’ve all seen it, in the eyes of our intended.<\/p>\n

Just. Find. A. Fresh. Metaphor. People. We need more than this, Bryan Ferry!<\/p>\n

Help me shine a light on interesting words and metaphors\u00a0by leaving a comment below, or by e-mail at jessid-at-richmond-dot-edu.<\/p>\n

See all of our Metaphors of the Month\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0and Words of the Week\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Valentines Day. Will you be my Valentine? That itself is metaphor, and you can read about the actual Saint(s) Valentine here. Warning: you will find a severed head in that box of chocolates. Out of curiosity, and a desire for a week to avoid writing about academic language, I decided to have a bit … Continue reading Metaphors of the Month! Silly Love Songs<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":589,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[87399,40197],"tags":[87401],"class_list":["post-1667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphor","category-vocabulary","tag-metaphor-of-the-month"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pcsCNV-qT","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/589"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1667"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1676,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1667\/revisions\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}