Digital Delights

A dying metaphor, according to Orwell, is one that is neither useful for evoking an image, nor one that has become a meaningful phrase in its own right. They are “worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves”. In science writing, dying metaphors can be most easily seen in journal article titles. Here are a few examples:

• On a collision course: competition and dispersal differences create no-analogue communities and cause extinctions during climate change
• Waking the dead: the value of population genetic analyses of historical samples
• Survival of the Fittest: Overcoming Oxidative Stress at the Extremes of Acid, Heat and Metal