If It’s on the Web, It’s Free–FALSE

Intelligent, informed, morally upright people have told me that anything on the web is public domain. They feel free to repost it, reprint it, resell it or re-use it in any way they wish without permission. Music, images, text–it’s all fair game.

Not so. The copyright laws apply to whatever is on the web in the same way they apply to whatever is in a newspaper, magazine, book, TV broadcast, radio or any other media. If it’s not fair use or if free use is not explicitly stated (as with something like wikicommons and wikimedia) then permission is required from the copyright owner. Here’s a couple more myths.
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I Is an Other (5): Metaphors at Work

In business, psychology, science and politics, successful metaphors should be as common as one-liners at a comedy convention, as numerous as drunks at a tailgate party, as bountiful as bribes in Chicago politics.

In advertising, GEICO, the insurance company, has successfully grabbed attention with its use of metaphor (or it’s close cousin, the analogy) in its “Happier Than” campaign.
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I Is an Other (4): When Metaphors Strike Out

We can’t help but think and speak in metaphors. A hot temperature is the “high” for the day and a cold temperature is the “low.” The future is “ahead” and the past “behind.”

As James Geary says in I Is an Other, virtually the only way to understand something new is in reference to the old. When the theory of plate tectonics was first used to explain continental drift in the 1960s, the earth was compared to rice pudding–hard on the surface but pliable and liquid underneath (pp. 174-75). And electromagnetic fields were compared to two absolutely still corks floating separately in a bowl of water. Push one and the other moves. Not a perfect analogy, but helpful.

Yet not every metaphor works. Greary gives several examples. Here’s a headline from the Tulsa World:
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I Is an Other (3): It’s the Metaphors, Stupid!

In the current election cycle, America is once again finding out the power of metaphor. Mitt Romney got some points out of “trickle-down government” in the first presidential debate. Barack Obama failed to counter with one of his own. While the principle famously guiding the Clinton campaign in 1992 was, “It’s the economy, stupid,” perhaps the better piece of wisdom would be, “It’s the Metaphors, Stupid.”
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I Is an Other (2): Wired for Metaphor

Metaphors aren’t just clever comparisons. Metaphors are the way we think.

In I Is an Other James Greary (see previous blog here) demonstrates this by considering Rebecca. When she reads a headline that says, “Belt Tightening Lies Ahead,” or if someone says, “I’ll show you the ropes,” she has no idea what either means. She doesn’t wear a belt, and no one showed her any ropes. Rebecca is an extremely intelligent person who has Asperger’s syndrome. Her brain is virtually incapable of processing metaphors. She only understands what is literal (or metaphors whose meaning she has memorized).
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I Is an Other (1): Awash in Metaphors

Louise, my mother-in-law who died a few years ago at age ninety-one, grew up in southern Illinois with her siblings, including Bertha. The two of them did not get along well, finding various ways to be at odds with each other over the years. Even some time after Bertha died Louise commented to me, “Why, Bertha had a tongue that could sit on the front porch and pick grapes in the back yard!”
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Wisdom from a Grizzled Editor

When I was new to the editing game, just a green, wide-eyed youth, my already grizzled boss, Jim Sire, told me, “When editing something, you can almost always improve it by throwing away the first three paragraphs.” It’s a bit of wisdom I’ve carried with me and applied many times for over thirty-five years.
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How “The Singer” Was Born

Our good friend and beloved IVP author, Calvin Miller, died on August 19. The Singer, published in 1975, became his best-known work. Here, in its entirety, is the preface he wrote to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition, in which he tells the story of the genesis of what Philip Yancey called “a groundbreaking book.”

In the 1960s the rock culture

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savior made his appearance in New York. Jesus Christ Superstar and Godspell opened on Broadway. Before long these musicals had entered common culture all across America. The tunes were memorable, and here and there the lyrics touched the New Testament account of Christ. Still, to me the Broadway Jesus seemed a pale imitation of the New Testament Christ. Someone, I thought, ought to write a creative account of the Christ of St. Matthew that St. Matthew would recognize. It was then that the chilling notion occurred to me: perhaps I was the one to do it.
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