Books, Articles, and Items of Academic Interest

In the wake of September’s hurricane Dorian, National Public Radio’s program On the Media featured an interview with John Morales, the Chief Meteorologist for WTVJ, Miami’s NBC Channel Six affiliate. Morales is a thirty-year veteran weather forecaster. When the topic came up of the unreliability of weather forecasting, Morales explained, “I fight tooth and nail against exaggeration and overhyping of weather situations.”

“I fight tooth and nail against exaggeration” is, of course, exaggeration. Metaphor often is. But I trust that Mr. Morales isn’t biting and scratching his colleagues when they say something like, “All of Florida will be washed into the Gulf of Mexico!”

Self-contradiction in this form probably has won its own Greek-sounding pseudo-accolade, but the closest one I have found in Richard Lanham’s Handbook of Rhetorical Termsis “aschematiston,” which means the “unskillful use of figures.” This doesn’t