Friday, December 7, 2007

Seesaw Change?

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I don't spend much time in the car, so I get my radio the twenty-first-century way. I was listening to On Point, a radio show out of Boston, and a caller used the expression "seesaw change," as in, a major change, a shift in thinking.

I've never heard this before. Of course, the caller meant "sea change." That expression comes from Shakespeare, from the Tempest (Act I, scene ii):

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

But "seesaw change"? I can understand why someone would use that expression--a seesaw goes up and down, but please, do we have to? So I googled it, and it turns out there are a handful of people using the expression, but not that many. Can we all agree that "sea change" isn't a metaphor so dead we need to mistake our way into a new dead metaphor?

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