Bill's Mixed Metaphors

Eating Elephants, and other bites and nibbles:

My boss often counseled engineers faced with a big problem with the following good advice. Something like a sports coach telling his team to "play ‘em one game at a time".

• "We’re going to eat this elephant one bite at a time."

There were several variations on this, some more confusing than others:

• "If you try to eat this elephant all in one bite, you’re going to have a hell of an indigestion."
• "This is an awfully big elephant to eat."
• "My elephant isn’t this big (hands close together), it’s about this big (hands farther apart)."
• "If they bite on that, and want it, that becomes a program."
• "Let’s see who takes the bite on that."
• "It’s better to have half a cake and eat it and enjoy it, than not to have any cake at all."

Other Metaphorical Mix-ups:

• "It’s like pulling the teeth from a hen."
• "Life is beautiful, then you die."
• "We’re between a hard and a rock place."
• "There’s no grass burning under THIS project."
• "I’m gonna dig in my feet on this one."
• "We have taken care of all of the silver bullets."
• "If you can get to first base, it will be a hell of a lot easier to get to second base."

Where to go from here

Bill's Introduction

Meeting Statements: bizarre but true quotes!

Palindromes: mine, others and links to more

Links: a variety of things I have found interesting

Send me email about my pages.

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