If a friend says to you:
“I just left my terrible job. I don’t know why I stayed so long. I guess I was just like a slowly boiled frog”
Do you get her meaning?[1]
Do you know that the metaphor is not true?[2]
Does it matter?[3]
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That the changes were so slow and gradual that she barely noticed them and thus stayed well past the point she should have done. ↩
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The metaphor is that “If you put a frog in a pan of already boiling water, it will jump out. But if you place it in a cold pan and then slowly heat it, it will sit there calmly until it boils to death”
Except it’s a complete myth that a frog won’t notice and allow itself to be boiled alive. The fact that this myth is so widespread however I take as a good thing, because that means there are very few people wanting to test it out. Although sadly this was not always true:
Several experiments involving recording the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water took place in the 19th century. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.
The moral of which I’m guessing is you can slowly boil a
froganything as long as you remove its brain.Additionally the entire metaphor is silly if you think about it – because a frog dumped in boiling water would not jump out – it would die. ↩
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IMHO? No. Because we’ve mangaged to convey a concept clearly and concisely – typically avoiding all the nonsense contained in fn2 above.
Bottom line here is that if people are using a metaphor to describe something to you – focus on the communication aspect rather than picking apart the factual accuracy of the thing. ↩