In a touching scene in the movie “Ford v Ferrari” Carroll Shelby, a Texan, tells a boy who lost his father in a racing accident, “Your Daddy thought you was finer than fur on a frog.” I was watching the movie in France in English with French subtitles. The translator said something like “Your father thought you were a very good boy.”
Metaphor, like poetry, does not translate easily or well.
The moment brought me back to trying to figure out military metaphor when I first enlisted. The American military is more than 60% southern and western, so for a Boston Yankee like me, I had trouble understanding what some of the sergeants were saying.
One of the first metaphors that confused me was hearing a sergeant say of a soldier struggling hopelessly with the wrong wrench for the job, “He looks like a monkey trying to fuck a football.” I have a literal mind, so I could picture what he was saying, but could not understand why he was saying it.
But those ten words hold lots of meaning. A monkey, at least in popular culture, is extremely sexually active and so might try to have an erotic relationship with almost anything. The monkey is presumed to have great energy which it will use even in pursuit of an impossible goal. So, a soldier trying with great energy to do something impossible is like that monkey.
In that era, the American military was trying to reduce the amount of swearing by sergeants. When one soldier was disagreeing with and rejecting another soldier, he could say, “Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut.” This, like suggesting intercourse with one’s self, is an impossible task, and one that would be peculiarly painful in the likely event it failed or even if it succeeded. This insult had been in circulation at least since World War II. Many years later, I was reading “Slaughterhouse Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, and smiled when I read the rolling doughnut metaphor.
But before I heard the traditional version, I heard my crew chief use the non-swearing variant using bureaucratic language to say the same thing. He said: “Please attempt aerial intercourse with a motivated, perforated pastry.”
After a while, the Army use of metaphor came easily to me. You could say I caught on, “quicker than chicken on a June bug.”
