Even Celebrities Cannot Use Hyperbole
A few days ago, in my article Allow Me to Exaggerate!!! I complained that some of my readers object to my use of hyperbole. It is now happening to everyone, especially celebrities. I think the whole world has gone cuckoo. Read what recently happened when Gwyneth Paltrow gave a speech at a tech conference near Los Angeles:
Yahoo Celebrity, 28 May 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow Calls Online Attacks 'Dehumanizing'
[Paltrow:] "You come across [online comments] about yourself and about your friends, and it's a very dehumanizing thing," she shared. "It's almost like how, in war, you go through this bloody, dehumanizing thing, and then something is defined out of it."
War? While that seems a little overly dramatic, Paltrow made a good case for why famous people make the perfect targets for online critics.
That seems like an appropriate analogy, online attacks almost feel like being in war. We know she doesn't mean online commenters are throwing grenades at her, it's just an analogy. Why did the author of the above article find a need to criticize Paltrow's use of the word war? Are we soon going to outlaw all similes? If I write that my love is like a rose, should someone object that that comparison is ludicrous, that no woman is the same as a flower?
Another example: Charlize Theron was criticized when she compared the intrusion of the press into her personal life (and her children's) as akin to rape:
Us Weekly, 4 Jun 2014, Charlize Theron Criticized Over "Raped" Comment
Charlize Theron is under fire for a remark she made likening media intrusion to rape.
In an interview with U.K.'s Sky News, the A Million Ways to Die in the West actress was asked if she ever searched her own name on the web. She replied, "I don't do that, so that's my saving grace. When you start living in that world, and doing that, you start I guess feeling raped."
...
"We wish Charlize Theron had used a more appropriate metaphor to describe the experience of being a celebrity in the era of digital media," Katherine Hull Fliflet tells Yahoo. "The horror of being raped should never be compared to the 'unpleasantness' someone could experience by Googling themselves."
The truth is nothing else except rape feels like rape. Nothing else except war feels like war.
Perhaps these idiots who criticize the use of analogy, hyperbole, metaphors and other figures of speech never took English classes in school.
I should point out that when I write that Obama is an incompetent moron I am not using a figure of speech - I really mean he is an incompetent moron - no exaggeration.
