In the 1960s, Charles Katz was convicted of illegal gambling, having used a public telephone booth in Los Angeles to place out-of-state bets. The evidence against him consisted of recordings of his own telephone conversations, which the FBI had collected with a warrantless wiretapping device they had installed on the outside of the phone booth. …
Metaphorical shooting?
In September 2019, Virginia State Senator Amanda Chase (Republican) ran a Facebook ad where she warned gun control advocates that she was “not afraid to shoot” them down: an extraordinarily insensitive choice of wording in light of the exceedingly contentious nature of the issue of gun rights in the USA, along with the regular occurrence…
How to resist a metaphor
Studying the various ways we have of resisting metaphor may shed light on effective means of fighting xenophobia and other forms of ignorance.