I am the first to admit that I enjoy a well-placed metaphor or simile.
There's nothing more refreshing than a brief, comparative phrase to surprise the reading mind in the midst of otherwise-drab prose. I collect those literary devices like business cards, flipping through my Rolodex of a memory in order to select the one best-equipped for the job. I habitually write beyond what is required to get my point across, and the perfect way to feed that habit is with a tasty metaphor.
What really grinds my gears, though, are those washed out, antiquated metaphors old fogies throw around when they run out of creative things to say. Nothing is worse than hearing, "I'm as blind as a bat!" or "It's music to my ears!" It's so mind-numbingly boring I could cry. It's as dull as ditchwater.
But the real crime occurs when one of those disgustingly cliched comparisons works.
As much as I hate to admit it, I cannot deny that the spectrum of taste represented by students at Tufts resembles, yes, a melting pot. Not the Melting Pot restaurant chain born from a weird 1970s fondue craze, but rather the metaphoric suggestion of a smooth, seamless melting of dissimilar things into homogenized goo. I suppose you could then say our combined tastes resemble something like fondue, but that's beside the point.
In all truthfulness, the student population at Tufts represents a wide variety in taste. Our preferences vary so distinctly that it sometimes surprises me to think we are a collective group under the name of "Tufts." Different sectors of the student body tend to converge in taste; it is dangerous to categorize, but those that stick together and identify with one another often share preferences.
There is no distinct "Tufts student" taste identity. If there was, I'd like to be in charge of codifying it: Robert Goulet would be required listening, and "Total Recall" (1990) would be required watching.
Is there a better way to phrase our distinctly intermixed taste preferences here at Tufts? Is "grab bag" more agreeable? I hesitate for a few reasons. This makes it seem like the friends we accumulate are the product of chaotic randomness. While many of my friendships began by chance, their durability and persistence in my life can be attributed to shared tastes and similar affinities for music, movies and the like. Also, grab bags made me nervous as a child. An irrational fear of alligators hiding in concealed spaces made me less than willing to reach my hand blindly into a bag.
Perhaps we truly are a melting pot. Perhaps our tastes scatter across a graph in so many different directions that there will never be a collective taste identity. Is this a weakness? Is this some kind of oddity, or totally predictable and obvious? Does this final column even have a point?
It does. I firmly believe we are unified by something: an oddness of taste. Tufts students have preferences that surprise and do not necessarily reflect their other defining characteristics. An IR major who pours over political theory books during the school day cannot wait to open up that waiting comic book at the end of the night. A dual-degree NEC student who plays Handel secretly owns the entire discography of Frank Zappa. We are not predictable, and we like what we like. No further analysis is needed.
If that is indeed the case, it looks like I'm out of a job. Maybe we could all go to the Melting Pot this weekend and talk things over.
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Madeline Hall is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. She can be reached at Madeline.Hall@tufts.edu.
