to collapse under rubble?

[Victor Steinbok]

To me, it seems "blockade" is just wrong--metaphor or not. But what's
the problem with "political rubble"? Buildings collapse during
earthquakes and, in a sense, are buried under a self-generated rubble.
Of course, it's more reasonable to say that the buildings collapse and
whatever was in them is or is under a pile of rubble. But, in this case,
the "rubble" is the condemnations thrown their way. I suspect, you're
looking for "buried under rubble". But they did not collapse under
"political weight"--and why can't randomly accumulated rubble become
weighty enough for a collapse? In any case, I don't see an
rabble-rousing rapscallions...

For my money, it's the "collapse" that's the wrong metaphor. Here, we
have "rubble" in the sense of "garbage", "junk",  and "collapse" in the
sense of "yield under pressure", "give way". But defenses collapse, not
the troops that mount them.

     VS-)

On 12/23/2011 2:37 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
> "House Republicans -- who rejected an almost identical deal on
> Tuesday -- collapsed under the political rubble that has accumulated
> over the week, much of it from their own party, worried that the
> blockade would do serious damage to their appeal to voters."
>
>   From today;s lead article in both the New York Times and the Boston
> Globe, by Jennifer Steinhauer.
>
> I perceive something off in the metaphor of "collapse under rubble"
> (not to mention the mixed metaphors of "rubble" and
> "blockade").  Does one collapse under rubble, or atop it?  Presumably
> Steinhauer meant something like "the House Republican's edifice
> collapsed under the politically hostile weight, some from their own
> party, that accumulated on top of it, burying them."
>
> Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org