“Trying to Remodel the Kitchen While You’re Also Cooking Thanksgiving Dinner”; “Powerful Women are like Napalm to me”; “the Picasso of Passive-Aggressive Karate”--Use of Visual, Evocative Expression to Emphasize One’s Point

[Rewritten July 31, 2017]

Here are some recent examples of highly effective communicators using a vivid, evocative expression while emphasizing something and thus making their assertion indelible--examples which, I hope, will inspire the rest of us into similarly imaginative analogies, especially when we are trying to break through the clutter.

• Discussing the steep challenges being faced during the construction of an all-new terminal complex at Salt Lake City International Airport, their Director of Operations, Peter Higgins, telling PBS’s “Nightly Business Report” earlier this year: “In many cases--airports particularly--you end up building on the same footprint you're occupying. So, oftentimes, you're trying to remodel the kitchen while you're trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner!”

 

• [From my 2014 archives.] In response to Charlie Rose’s comment “You also create good roles for women,” famous movie director David O. Russell saying: “Yes, powerful women have become the napalm to me as a filmmaker...Melissa Leo in ‘The Fighter,’ Amy Adams in ‘American Hustle,’ Jennifer Lawrence in ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘American Hustle’... Powerful women who can clean your clock in a way you never see coming. They can surprise you; they can, as Irving (Christian Bale’s character in ‘American Hustle’) says of the Jennifer Lawrence character: ‘She was the Picasso of passive-aggressive karate.’ I love every aspect of (Jennifer and Amy)--from the glamor to the rawness.” 

   

© Copyright 2017  V. J. Singal