Bad metaphors

A bad metaphor fails to clarify a concept. For example, today I sat through a 40-minute metaphor on how baseball games represent Markov models which did not clarify Markov models for me because I do not follow baseball–but the presenter loved baseball and shared a metaphor he thought was relatable.

People share bad metaphors because they assume what is relatable to them is relatable to their audience. A famous one is Kamala Harris’s “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” said first by her mother who grew up in Tamil Nadu where coconut trees are aplenty. But Harris shared this metaphor in Washington, D.C, during a ceremony for an initiative advancing students’ education to try to convey that the initiative must support students’ communities–because everyone “[exists] in the context of all in which [they] live and what came before [them].” But there are few coconut trees in D.C. and fewer in America, and rather than understanding her point Harris’s audience was left wondering how a student resembles a coconut falling out of a tree.¹

A more effective phrase would’ve been one that is universally understood–“You think you were born yesterday?” But this phrase is less relatable to Harris personally, whose mother’s phrase was about falling out of a coconut tree and not about being born yesterday. Still the coconut tree line went viral–which says more about how unclear phrases can make you famous than what makes a good, clarifying metaphor.

1. The entire speech containing the coconut tree metaphor is unclear, which makes sense because the coconut tree line exists in the context of all that came before it. ↩