My 8th grade Language Arts colleague, Paige, and I have used your advice to expand our students conception of metaphor beyond its narrow poetic confines. They begin to see how integral metaphor is to making sense of the world, that they are engaged in metaphor not only in the classroom, but also the cafeteria, the skate park, and, well, everywhere. They become aware of language and its mysterious power. They begin to realize that there is a wonderful alchemy at work when we play with words and play we do.

Lest metonymy and synecdoche feel left out, nickname-like abstraction or representation of a whole. Delight when a trope is metaphor, simile, and metonymy or synecdoche, and recipients get the meanings full bore. And irony verbal, situational, dramatic, comic, Socratic. and litotes. Intents and actuals at poetic-conceit odds with their superficialities. Extended tropes or situational, long or short. A trope can fly off its tracks or runway, and crash or soar.

I don’t do as well on those trope tests as the literal-minded thinkers who put them together think they test. Rosarch inkblot tests, that’s what they are. I see stronger connections than the “right” answers that are unitended but calculated to dumbfound figurative thinkers. Can’t have any free thinkers loose from the monkey house. But I did well enough on the GREs to meet minimum expectations of mediocrity.

I thought, at first, this Bad Advice Wednesday topic was about grammatical vice and virtue uses of the proximity pronouns this and that and these and those. This is what I thought: That will be cool. But these thisses and thats weren’t those.