Anthology of Voided Metaphors

Editor’s Note

What follows is a collection of texts that have been subjected to an operation for which the English language has, characteristically, no adequate name. The German is better: Metaphernentkernung, literally “the coring-out of metaphors,” though even this fails to capture the full violence of the procedure. The French évidement métaphorique — “metaphorical hollowing” — is more precise but less dramatic. We have settled, after considerable deliberation and one regrettable incident involving a lexicographer from Tübingen who took the matter personally, on the phrase voiding of metaphors, which has the advantage of suggesting both evacuation (the metaphor has been emptied of its figurative content) and annulment (the metaphor has been declared null and void, as one voids a cheque drawn on an account that was never adequately funded), and which carries, in its echo of the legal and the gastrointestinal, exactly the combination of institutional gravity and bodily discomfort that the operation itself produces.

The procedure is as follows. One takes a text from the literature of computation — a discipline that has, in its brief and excitable history, borrowed more metaphors from more domains than any other field since theology, and with approximately the same level of concern for returning them — and one identifies the central figure. Debt. Garbage. Pattern. Refactoring. Cathedral. Bullet. These are words that the software trade conscripted from older and more material occupations: from civil engineering, from municipal sanitation, from the decorative arts, from petroleum chemistry, from ecclesiastical architecture, from — and here one must pause, because the borrowing becomes difficult to describe without laughing — from werewolf hunting. In each case, the original meaning was seized, stripped of its tangible referent, dressed in the unfamiliar garments of abstraction, and put to work in a context so remote from its origins that the kidnapping has gone entirely unnoticed. The programmer who speaks of “technical debt” no more thinks of bridges than the person who speaks of “comprehending” an idea thinks of physically grasping it with his hands. The metaphor has died, in the Nietzschean sense: it has been circulated so long and handled so often that its figurative face has been worn smooth, like a coin passed through too many transactions, until what remains is a disc of metal whose original image is no longer legible.

We have — and we do not apologise for this, though we acknowledge that apology may eventually be warranted, and have retained counsel accordingly — resurrected these dead metaphors by voiding them: by returning each text, bodily and without anaesthetic, to the domain from which its central figure was originally conscripted. The argument is preserved. The structure is intact. The prose is, in most cases, improved by the renewed contact with materiality, since a sentence about the corrosion of rebar in a salt-spray environment is almost always more vivid than the sentence about “code degradation” it has replaced, and a paragraph about the Ottoman tileworkers’ empirically determined optimal density of eye motifs per square centimetre possesses a specificity that no amount of “object-oriented” hand-waving can match. But the domain — the ground on which the argument stands, the earth beneath its feet, the planet it inhabits — has been shifted, silently and completely, from the abstract terrain of computation to the concrete terrain of the figure’s native habitat.

The effect is, we believe, instructive, though “instructive” is the word academics use when they mean “amusing and we wish to pretend otherwise.” A text about “technical debt” that actually concerns bridges reveals, through its sudden and slightly alarming literalness, how much of the original argument was doing structural work and how much was ornamentation bolted on after the fact. A text about “garbage collection” that actually concerns municipal waste management exposes the degree to which the computational metaphor was, all along, describing a problem of civilisation rather than a problem of memory allocation — and suggests, uncomfortably, that the computer scientists understood the garbage problem better than the municipal engineers, which is either a compliment to the computer scientists or an indictment of the engineers, and possibly both. A text about “design patterns” that actually concerns textile motifs demonstrates, with an elegance that we did not anticipate and therefore cannot take credit for, that the patterns were always patterns, in every domain, and that the Gang of Four was writing about the decorative arts whether they knew it or not.

Whether the original authors would approve of this treatment is a question we have elected not to ask, on the grounds that the answer might constrain us and that constraint, at this stage of the project, would be inconvenient. Several of the authors are still living. One or two of them are, we understand, litigious. We proceed regardless, sustained by the conviction — shared by the editors and, we trust, by the reader who has purchased this volume or at least opened it with sufficient intention to reach this paragraph — that a metaphor, once released into the common language, belongs to everyone who uses it, and that its return to its native soil is not a theft but a repatriation: the restoration of a displaced figure to the homeland from which it was taken, possibly against its will, certainly without adequate compensation, and under circumstances that would not survive scrutiny by any tribunal that took the rights of metaphors seriously.

The texts are presented without further commentary. They do not need it. They are, in the particular and mildly unsettling way of all successfully voided metaphors, their own commentary — texts that say exactly what they mean and, in doing so, reveal how much the originals were saying something else entirely, while pretending, with the serene confidence of the metaphor that has forgotten it is one, to be speaking plainly.

— E. Tarnów-Weigl, Vienna, February 2026

Contents

1. Worse Is Better — Moral Philosophy
2. The Cathedral and the Bazaar — Architecture
3. No Silver Bullet — Lycanthrope Elimination
4. Technical Debt — Infrastructure Finance
5. Garbage Collection — Municipal Sanitation
6. Design Patterns — Decorative Arts
7. Refactoring — Petroleum Re-Refining
8. Clean Code — Signals Intelligence
9. The Pragmatic Programmer — Civil Service