Friday, October 29, 2004

PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN’T USE SIMILE

1. Michael Ovitz. The Hollywood power broker, explaining how he was ignored and mistreated when he became a Disney executive, says he was “cut out like a cancer.”

Here’s the complete quote:

I guess you could say I got pushed out the sixth-floor window. I was being left out of meetings. Nobody was talking to me. I was cut out like cancer. All of a sudden I found myself with no information. I didn't know what was going on.

The simile is wrong on so many levels that it’s difficult to address them all. It’s so wrong that I can only conclude that, when Ovitz arrived at Disney, company leader Michael Eisner suddenly realized the extent of Ovitz’ failure at language and immediately ordered everyone to be rude to him.

Anyway, there’s no one else on the list.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Marc: Nothing stands "six-stories" tall on the Disney campus. Period.

Scape7 said...

So you could say Ovitz got pushed out the sixth-floor window, but you shouldn't. Just as Ovitz shouldn't say he was cut out like cancer, although both comments truly express, through irresponsible exaggeration, the despair he felt at being an incredibly wealthy person treated as though he wasn't valued.

How, he must have been wondering, could I become this wealthy without being valuable?

Still, it begs the question: Why invent a theoretical and rhetorical sixth floor? When not get tossed off an imaginary seventh floor, or tenth, or twentieth?

This is what he gets for thinking small. Or low.