dora17 wrote:It's like referring to "a bad part of town," which is commonly accepted to be a perfectly sensible phrase. Are the buildings and asphalt and metal etc. in that area posessed? Nooo, we use our common sense to understand that the people there may pose a threat.
No doubt a town can be bad, just as anything that has qualities can be bad. But then "bad" can modify
any quality intelligibly, whereas "violent" cannot. Everything is capable of being bad, not everything is capable of being violent. For example, we can have "bad eggs" but not "violent eggs" -- the former makes sense whereas the latter (except under some strange, imaginary circumstances) doesn't. In the same way, we can have "bad roads" but not "violent roads."
dora17 wrote:Just fill in, "like a dude driving an Escalade on meth"... there, feel better? :wink:
But that's not what the author said. He said "an Escalade on meth." That means that the vehicle itself was on meth. You can't equate the vehicle with the driver. We wouldn't say, for instance, that the "Escalade had its license revoked," would we? If the author wanted to say that the driver was on meth, then he should have said that -- but then that would have mangled the simile even more. As it is, it remains a truly awful piece of writing.
...I get that if you are perfectly literal, the sentence means the car is on meth. What I am saying is that those of you who focused on that so obsessively that you couldn't say one thing about the actual point of the article were just being silly. I just think we're all capable of understanding that the car was not on meth. If we understand what the writer is saying, must we minutely dismantle every figure of speech and make sure it makes perfect literal sense or else we cannot discuss the actual gist of the piece?
