The Meat of the Matter

Death of a Metaphor

This came to me from defective yeti, where I meet all my dysfunctional sasquatch needs. Unfortunately, one of my favorite metaphors from nature--a metaphor that I always thought was true--has turned out to be a Hollywood fabrication. --Jim kicks a pebble and looks glum-- Lemmings, my good friends and readers of TMOTM, do not commit suicide. At least the linked story paints a very compelling picture that they do not. The entire time I was reading that article, I was thinking in the back of my head "wait a minute, I've seen film of lemmings running in droves off of a cliff!" But alas, the end of the article describes how Disney fabricated this image in order to horrify generations of children the world over. As much as I loved that metaphor, I can't use it anymore. I guess when humans act like what we *thought* were lemmings, we aren't. In fact, when lemmings chat with each other, they say things like "you're just following the crowd like a human."