I expect most readers know what a metaphor is. But
‘Ousiastic’? Well I admit I just made the word up, though I felt confident it
must already exist. However I find it’s not in the Oxford Dictionary. I derived it from
the Greek ‘Ousia’ which means ‘substance’, so if something is ‘ousiastic’ it’s
an actual thing, and not ‘merely’ an idea or some other abstract entity. Now a
metaphor is something verbal; we might be talking or writing about actual
things, but the metaphors we use are figures of speech. By ‘Ousiastic Metaphor’ I mean using an actual thing in place of some other thing that
we can’t or won’t use.
Slipping on a banana-skin was a trope of early silent comedy
films. Some chap is strolling along the street and suddenly he whips out a
banana, eats it, and tosses the skin over his shoulder. Someone else comes
along, steps on it, and falls over. This joke became standard and was repeated
right up to the days of Woody Allen: in one of his films there are giant
bananas, about six foot long, and sure enough Woody Allen eats one and drops
the skin, and we are all laughing proleptically because we know that any second
his pursuers will slip on it.
But hold on: how often, in real life, do people eat bananas
in the street, and then toss the skin down? How often do people then slip on them?
Are banana skins notoriously slippery? (No, they’re not actually: try to slip
on one.) What is slippery and often
found on pavements is something else entirely: dog shit. People regularly stand
in it and often slip over. But dog or indeed any kind of shit, like primary and
even secondary sexual organs, are things whose existence the Great American
Public prefers not to acknowledge; only very advanced modern films allow them.
So there you are: the old silent comedies used banana-skins
as an ousiastic metaphor for dog shit.
(The difficult-to-make-out black and white picture is a
still from a Harold Lloyd film, said to show the first recorded example of the
banana-skin joke.)
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