Simon & Garfunkel Commit Murder (Well, at least Manslaughter)

Mostly I’m not a stickler about using correct grammar. I enjoy English being limber and colloquial some of the time. That includes watching it flex itself on the parallel bars of mixed metaphors occasionally. What could be better than, “I’m drinking like a chimney; smoking like a fish.

But there is one mixed metaphor that makes me cringe every time I hear it. It’s the mixed metaphor that dominates Simon and Garfunkel’s popular song, “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” That song is meant to be comforting – a reassurance that there could be someone looking out for your best interests, someone ready to take your side and ease your way through troubled times. But really, the lyrics of that song assure just the opposite. They encourage their friend, their beloved, to sail ahead, oblivious to the fact that they are going to smash her to smithereens in just a few more lines.

This murderous onslaught happens as the result of a mixed metaphor. The singers’ friend is represented as being a sailboat – “Sail on, sail on silver girl.”

But alas, her “time will come” all too soon, and in a way that the song’s soothing tone doesn’t warn about. The singer/singers generally represent themselves as being a bridge, likely a drawbridge. (Although there’s confusion even on this point, because one stanza makes the singers themselves sailboats. “I’m sailing right behind.”) But the dominant image represents the singers as a bridge. When they get to the crux of the song, “Like a bridge over troubled water, I will lay me down,” I picture the two brackets of a drawbridge lowering onto the unsuspecting masts of the sailboat going underneath. I see the masts shattering, snapping to one side, weighing the whole boat askew. I see the boat capsizing, sinking like a mini Titanic. Instead of easing the way for their friend, Simon and Garfunkel smashed down on her head, throwing her overboard to drown.

Part of the reason I have such a vivid imagining of this disaster is that I live in Chicago, the city that features a series of famous bridges going over the Chicago River. Sailboats attempting to navigate the River have to line up and wait for topside vehicular traffic to be stopped at certain intervals, and for the bridges to be raised, one by one, to allow the boats passage. See the picture of one of Chicago’s trademark raisings.

A bridge would be a good thing to lay down if your friend were a pedestrian or if she were driving a car. Then making a crossing for her over troubled waters would be a good thing to do. But if she’s a sailboat – the results of laying down a bridge in her path are likely to be fatal. Smash, bang, whap! One girlfriend eliminated, leaving Simon and Garfunkel free to move onto the girl with “diamonds on the soles of her shoes.”