This Post Has Not Been Mimitized

Once, during a particularly busy lunch shift at the Italian restaurant where I waited tables, the manager (an Italian from Italy whose favorite American restaurant was Goofy’s Kitchen in Disneyland) said this to me:  “Those people on Table 42? They are mimetized!”

Okaaaaay.

This wasn’t the first time he’d said something unintelligible.  In fact, most of what he said was unintelligible, but I was—as I had been on many other occasions—forced to work out what he meant. Table 42 was my table and clearly they needed something because they were…mimetized.

I made a brief attempt at getting him to explain. “Um, mimetized? What do they need?”

“You know,” he said, getting angry at my lack of understanding something that was so obvious, “what like they look. Mi-me-tized.”

Well, that helped.

My mind went to work. “Mimetized” sounded like “mimetic,” which I knew meant copy or imitate. Like mimes. Immediately, the image of mimes popped into my head, distracting me momentarily with their stripy shirts and annoying faces. Shoving that aside (since I had been to Table 42 and they clearly were not mimes), I asked myself; what is it that mimes do? They pretend? No. They imitate? Sort of. This was getting me nowhere so I went back to mimetic. To copy…or…resemble. One thing resembling another. They looked like something. They looked like something else. They copied something else. An exact resemblance. So close a resemblance you wouldn’t know it from the original. I thought about Table 42. They were wearing colors that matched the décor of the restaurant. They resembled it so closely in fact that they were…camouflaged.

“You mean camouflaged?” I said.

“No,” the manager said, “their clothes. Mimetized.”

“The word is ‘camouflaged’ in English,” I pointed out.

“Are you sure? Because in Italian…”

But I didn’t stick around to hear the rest because by then the people at Table 42 actually did need something; coffee refills, water, or an imaginary glass box to get out of. Later, I discovered that one of the Italian words for camouflage is mimetizzare. My Italian manager had thoughtfully “translated” it into English so that I would understand. I would have gotten there sooner if I’d had a good working knowledge of Italian, but at that point I was mostly just fluent in food and curses—long, elaborate curses that involved people driving off cliffs and having their entire families suffer because they were such lousy tippers and shorter curses that mostly involved variations on the theme of male genitalia and <fill in the blank> Dio/Madonna (ie, porco Dio, Dio cane, puttana Madonna, etc.)—and my vocabulary was limited. So I had to go through the convoluted mimetic/mime/imitate route before figuring out that the piece of information I was being given wasn’t even important. For a half-second I’d been kind of proud of myself for decoding what Mr. Goofy’s Kitchen had said but then I just felt like an idiot. Who had time for this?

I’ll bet you want to know what my point is, don’t you?

My point is that if you are writing in English, your reader should not have to know Italian to understand what you are saying. To be more specific, while I’ve never believed that writers should spoon-feed their readers, nor should writers make readers work so hard that said readers get irritated and give up.

I’ve been giving this quite a bit of thought lately since I’ve been doing a great deal of editing and whenever I’m dispensing advice about writing I think carefully about what I’m saying and whether or not I’m just missing something in the text. Because maybe it’s… mimetized. And in some cases, I do catch myself and find myself seeing brilliance in, say, a metaphor that had heretofore been incomprehensible. Most of the time, however, it isn’t brilliant—it’s the result of trying too hard or sloppiness or simple attention to whatever it is that the writer is trying to say. I’ve run into this often of late—metaphors and similes that are so far out I wonder what the writer was (or wasn’t) thinking when s/he typed them out.

There is a list here of some hilarious examples of what can go wrong with metaphor/simile. But I have also seen things like: “The sea was as still as melted ice.”

So let’s think about that for a minute… Right.

Or, how about this one: “They snapped at each other like two hyenas playing backgammon.”

Note: the above example is one I just made up but it is very similar to some I have seen recently. First of all, let’s think about hyenas. What are they known for? Laughing, not snapping. Snapping is more the domain of turtles or dogs. So fight away the thing is a bit off. But more importantly…playing backgammon? Why are they playing backgammon? Why would hyenas play backgammon? Is there something I’m missing here? Some connection between hyenas and backgammon that I should know about but have completely missed? What is wrong with me? This book is too hard for me!

No…wait…

 It’s just really bad writing. Now I’m annoyed. And I’m leaving.  

Nobody loves a good metaphor more than I do. Not only that, but I enjoy odd metaphors, unusual connections. My son has helped me with that because he sees connections between things in the world that I never would have noticed. But even before my son came along, I was hopeless at those exams that tested one’s knowledge of analogies. The analogy tests were always multiple choice and I could never figure out which was the correct choice because if you stretch (and it isn’t much of a stretch) you can see how any one thing is to another thing like any third thing is to any fourth thing.

My point: I’m okay with metaphors that aren’t obvious. But as a reader I get annoyed when a writer makes me work to see a connection and then I realize that I’ve given the writer too much credit and that the writer hasn’t even taken the time to think about whether or not what s/he’s saying makes sense and is just throwing words against each other for effect.

Read it out loud. Think about it. Does it make sense? No? Then simplify. Yes? Go for it.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go mimetize some cake.