Communicating across metaphorical differences
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The metaphorical contributions to that plausible exchange are derived from (American) football, which is appropriate given Tank McNamara's fictional background. There are plenty of other sports with extensive metaphorical leakage, like baseball, basketball, soccer, tennis, cricket, wrestling, … And lots of other domains with analogous possibilities — war, computing, fashion, investing, D&D, weather, gambling, internal combustion engines, etc.
I expect that current chatbots can correctly identify the sources of such metaphors, but I wonder how well they do when asked to list metaphorical uses of phrases from a given domain. It would be easy enough to run through a few examples, and maybe some commenters will oblige us.
Russell said,
July 27, 2025 @ 10:20 am
Horse racing and boxing may have the most metaphorical leakage of any sports.
Sniffnoy said,
July 27, 2025 @ 11:50 am
It took me a while to get the "spiked the cat" joke. I assumed this was some weird phrase I wasn't familiar with. It took me a while to realize what was meant was that, when this past conversation was occurring, the cat was nearby and Tank grabbed it and spiked it. It was confusing because no cat had been mentioned, and the language used doesn't really distinguish between "when you did this, you also spiked the cat" and "by doing this, you spiked the cat" (it's the former but I inferred the latter). Think that probably could have been written more clearly — just adding the word "then" would help a fair bit.
Brett said,
July 27, 2025 @ 12:24 pm
The total randomness of, "You spiked the cat," (with no exclamation point) made that the best part of the comic in my view.
Terry K. said,
July 27, 2025 @ 1:56 pm
I always find it interesting how baseball metaphors crop up in broadcasts of other sports.
Jon W said,
July 27, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
@Sniffnoy: That's not Tank. In the linked page, Tank is the guy in the banner above the comic with the balls coming at his head.
/df said,
July 28, 2025 @ 1:49 am
Last week's Sunday Times in London ran an interview with a guy who had translated for football (aka soccer) coaches; the paper is being recycled and the online article is paywalled; maybe it was Tony Costante?
The article mentioned that a literal translation of "deep", as in "playing too deep" — too close to your own goal — into, if I recall correctly, Spanish ("posición profunda"?) would be understood in the opposite sense. Maybe I was alone in struggling to disambiguate this metaphorical jargon in English from context when I first encountered it, but this news gave me some vindication.
Incidentally, the jargon in the cartoon's metaphors is not mainstream in the UK, though "MVP" is making some headway.
Philip Taylor said,
July 28, 2025 @ 4:30 am
Sorry, as a naïve Briton I am still no wiser : How (and why) does one "spike a cat" ?
Doug said,
July 28, 2025 @ 5:31 am
"How (and why) does one "spike a cat" ?"
One doesn't. One spikes a football by "intentionally and forcefully throwing the ball to the ground" as a gesture of celebration after a touchdown in American footbal:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spike_(gridiron_football)
Spiking a cat in celebration of a promotion would be grossly inapprpriate.
Philip Taylor said,
July 28, 2025 @ 8:53 am
Oh. Thank you. I am now undoubtedly wiser, but sadly do not forsee an opportunity for putting that new-found wisdom into gainful practice …