Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Removing an ant from your ear canal

 The usually wonderful writer Anthony Lane uses a lazy analogy in describing some lyrics from a pop song.
Trying to get them out of your head is like trying to dislodge an ant that has crawled into your ear canal.
Not that hard I would imagine- I would stick my head under a sink.
More importantly an analogy fails when a reader is asked to understand something they know well by comparing it to something they don't know at all. Everyone knows what it is like to have a pop song that won't stay out of their head. Lane asks us to compare that to something very few people have experienced.

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