Metaphors for cheese

Had a busy weekend. Not, sadly, on the revisions front, but I went down to the Puyallup Fair with friends. Class it under research: should I ever have need of a strange fair event for my characters to attend, I have now witnessed Mutton Busting for the first time. For those, like me, who have not encountered it before, it involves strapping a 3-6 year old into protective gear, putting them on the back of a sheep, and then releasing the sheep to run in extreme (often leaping) annoyance to join a flock at the other end of the pen. The one who holds on longest without falling off wins.

I was more than a little dubious of the parents who not only allowed this, but pushed some kids into it. Fortunately, the MC pulled any kid showing reluctance. You’d have thought the oldest kids would do best with more development and physical coordination and such, but there seemed to be a kind of sweet spot in the middle, between being lighter and thus having an easier time staying on, and being old enough to understand just what your parents were DOING to you. The MC also mentioned that 70% of their winners were girls. The one at our show was. She was having the time of her life, too.

Anyway, to the title of this post! My website statistics page gives me searches that resulted in people finding this site. Some are very obvious like “rhiannon held writer” and some are middling obvious like “radcon 2011 pictures”, and some are obvious why they got here, but not why they’d think to search that. Who else in the world would think to search for “toast rock”? And some are plain inexplicable, as in the title. I figured I’d pick out one every so often, and actually write a post on it.

So this, anonymous metaphors for cheese searcher out there, is for you.

The trouble is, metaphors for simple things are like dictionary definitions for simple words. You define complicated words with simple ones (optimally) but simple ones seem to require greater complication in their definition words the simpler they are. Witness a definition for “the”: “used, especially before a noun, with a specifying or particularizing effect, as opposed to the indefinite or generalizing force of the indefinite article a or an”. Particularizing, huh? Similarly, if your aim in metaphorizing something is to make it easier to understand, needing to use something less easy to understand to explain it seems…not quite the point.

So cheese is like…less tangy, more solid yogurt? Less fatty butter? Cheese is like the feeling of being very hungry and then being full because you ate a bunch of tasty protein that was smooth and kind of creamy sometimes and tasted of a flavor that is…

You know, what, I give up! CHEESE IS LIKE CHEESE. Unless it’s not and it’s more like a chewy kitchen sponge or something, in which case that’s not cheese I want (though it’s very evocative cheese, fiction-wise!).

A tangential note, for those people who inevitably read my werewolf fiction in which I write things like “The scent of her anger caught his attention” and write notes like What does anger smell like?: I’ll trade. You tell me what garlic smells like, and I’ll tell you what anger smells like. And no, the answer isn’t freesia, any more than garlic smells like apples and sweetpeas. Garlic smells like garlic! It’s a self-referential building block.