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Wouldn't Rosetta Stone be a better metaphor than Holy Grail?
by bostonpete 8y ago
Wouldn't Rosetta Stone be a better metaphor than Holy Grail?
- hetman 8y ago"Holy grail" is being used as an idiom and not a metaphor here.
- b_tterc_p 8y agoIdioms are colloquial metaphors
- macleginn 8y agoNo, they are not. The meaning of an idiom is not predictable from its constituent words, that’s it. A metaphor involves some kind of meaning transfer. In this case some properties of the ‘prototypical’ Holy Grail (desirability mostly) are transferred to the stalagmites. The source for the transfer itself could potentially be an idiom, but in this case it’s not, actually. The word ‘grail’, albeit rare, has a normal meaning (a kind of cup), and ’holy grail‘ is what it is: a holy cup. We just decided based on the strength of the literary tradition to call a particular object that way.
- macleginn 8y agoIt would. They got the accomplishment (“A precise and accurate C14 calibration is considered the Holy Grail of radiocarbon dating”, from the original paper) and the means necessary for it mixed up.
- kiriakasis 8y agoFinding the means necessary to an accomplishment is in itself an accomplishment. If their work was to search for perfect samples then the accomplishment was finding them. If their work was in calibration then the samples are just a mean. Maybe in the last decades everyone knew that good stalagmites were needed and so people were searching for the perfect ones. It is all a matter of what story are you trying to tell.