I know it isn’t nice to pick on people about grammar when they are speaking without teleprompters and notes, but some offenses are hard to let slide. I previously poked fun at Mitt Romney for his repeated failings during a Republican forum, but now it’s Senator Joe Biden’s turn to raise the hair on the back of my neck.

I often hear people refer to something as being literally some metaphor-or-other. I understand that they are just trying to draw dramatic attention to a metaphor, that they meant figuratively, and that if they had a chance to write the same statement down they probably would have gotten it right. Senator Biden just couldn’t stop himself:

As we try desperately with a bare majority in the United States Congress to alter the course this president has set us on, a course that not figuratively [but] literally has us careening off the tracks internationally and domestically, there is one great big boulder that sits in the middle of the road: it’s Iraq.

What a travesty of a statement. What butchery of the language. In these days when the sitting President of the United States sounds like a nincompoop on a regular basis, we’re in danger of becoming numb to these kinds of shenanigans. Let’s tear this statement apart a little, shall we?

• “As we try… to alter the course this president has set us on…” this is a good, strong nautical metaphor. The nation is a ship, the president is its captain, the course we have been set on represents the policies that will influence our collective future. It’s such a good fit, as metaphors go, that it almost completely escapes notice when used.
• “…a course that not figuratively [but] literally has us careening off the tracks…” Oh my. We’ve mixed our metaphors here, haven’t we. One doesn’t set a course when on a track. The tracks negate the need for such fine-tuning. One sets the speed, to be sure, and through the various switches that may be on a rail line, one can route the track-borne conveyance as needed, but there’s no setting of course here. Throw in the misuse of “literal” and reinforce it through a compounded misuse of “figurative,” and you have the grammatical barb that caught my ear like a mis-cast fishing line. Ouch, Joe.
• “…there is one great big boulder that sits in the middle of the road…” So now it’s a road? What sorry state our country must be in, if it has gone from an ill-advised course onto a track that it careened off of only to be obstructed by a boulder in the middle of the road. In one sentence I’m seeing three mismatched metaphors and a claim that the country is actually a train. Oh, dear.

The moral of the story, of course, it to please say what you mean to say. If you truly feel you need to add flair, to invoke a visceral response to a dull subject, do so with some caution. If you spice up your rhetoric too heavily, you can ruin what could have been a good, healthy meal.

As for the speech itself, the senator makes some excellent points, as he often does. He just got off to a rocky start this time. I guess I’m just a sensitive audience.