Errors & Omissions: Jokey simile hits the wrong note

Plus misfired archaic language and an eggcorn in this week's Independent

A food article on Wednesday lamented badly made sandwiches: “Cut a slice of bread too thick and … you’ll only taste that claggy door-stop bread; too thin and it falls apart like a boy band two years into a world tour.”

That jokey simile, comparing a sandwich to a boy band, seems to me to be the wrong way round. The purpose of a simile is to give the reader a mental picture of something they have never seen, by likening it to something familiar to everybody. It is a familiar device in epic poetry. Here is Milton, in the first book of Paradise Lost, addressing the Holy Spirit: “Thou from the first/ Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread/ Dove-like satst brooding on the vast Abyss …”

Neither the reader nor the poet has seen the Holy Ghost, but we all know what a dove looks like.

We also know what it is like when a sandwich comes apart in your hands, so I suppose one might cast light on the break‑up of a boy band, a thing of which few of us have direct experience, by likening it to the collapse of a sandwich. But to go in the other direction – explaining a sandwich by reference to a boy band – seems pointless.

• “There is plenty of blood and gore,” said a review of a production of Richard III, published on Wednesday. That sent me to the Oxford dictionary to find out if there is any difference between the two.

There is, just. “Gore” starts off in Old English meaning filth, and later becomes clotted blood or blood shed in carnage.

So can our review be acquitted of the charge of saying the same thing twice? Not really, unless you assume that the “blood” in the play was shed accidentally, leaving only the “gore” to be blamed on deliberate malice. Unlikely in Richard III.

• More archaic language in a technology column published on Thursday: “Facebook [is] evidently packed with people sitting and waiting for adverts to hove into view.”

You could argue that that should be “heave” not “hove”, and historically you would be right. “Hove” is an old-fashioned past tense of “heave”, now superseded by “heaved”. (The Society for the Preservation of English Irregular Verbs should have had something to say about that, but that is an argument for another day.) And ships were said to “heave into view” – that is to say, lift themselves above the horizon.

The trouble is that “hove” has become fossilised. It is now found only on “hove into view” and people have forgotten that it is a past tense of “heave”. It’s all a bit of a mess. Perhaps “hove into view” is best avoided.

• “Leave.EU is streaks ahead of the others in putting T-shirts, mugs and other merchandise on sale,” said a news story on Tuesday. That should be “streets ahead”. You may streak ahead, but that is a different expression.