No Way!

I was an engineering intern ("co-op") at Procter and Gamble during college -- three terms in Cincinnati and one in Sherman, Texas. During one of my Cincinnati semesters I roomed with three young P&G engineers, two of whom had been in the same fraternity at MIT a few years before. This story is from them, and has stuck with me ever since...

The frat house was having a party on Saturday night. The guys were trying to talk their Monday-through-Friday cleaning lady into coming in on Sunday to clean up after the party. She knew better, and rejected all of their pleas using her less-than-perfect English, but they were being very persistent. She finally said, "No! You're barking up a dead wall!"

Writers and public speakers know how useful a good metaphor is, but that mixing two metaphors is the sign of a hack (or at least a sloppy writer). It's the rare author who can mix three metaphors, though, in such powerful fashion:

• Barking up the wrong tree
• Beating a dead horse
• Talking to a wall

It has a certain ridiculous charm, doesn't it? So the next time you want to say emphatically "No way!" feel free to say "You're barking up a dead wall!" instead, and see what happens. It worked for her, and they had to do the Sunday post-party cleanup themselves.

Pat