The Politico But it wasn't revealing because she was suggesting her husband is "evil and bad."

It was revealing because — asked about dealing with evil men like Osama bin Laden — her mind seemed to go to her domestic enemies. It’s absurd to suggest that she thinks Bill is evil like Osama. But Kenneth Starr? Rick Santorum? Her joke suggests that she buys into the notion that American and Middle Eastern “zealots” are cut from the same cloth, an idea that dovetails with her belief that there was (and is) a right-wing conspiracy to destroy the Clintons.

This is what she said: “What in my background equips me to deal with evil and bad men? [pause][laughter by audience, speaker joins in]”. Later when quizzed by journalists, she did what she was told by her media coach and repeated her talking points. Sadly in that she didn’t have another option.

But this is what she should have said. “You know. Metaphors and analogies are funny beasts. They seem to lead you down paths opening new vistas and all of a sudden, like in a bad dreams, you’re falling off a precipice. This is because we’re used to metaphors [have a folk theory] only when they fully spell out how something is like something else. But more often than not, they leave most of the potential similarities unexpressed or even unimagined. And sometimes the similarity is even coincidental - based on similar sounding words, alliteration, rhyme or spelling. What happened here, is that I paused at the wrong moment and all these coincidental similarities started rushing into the vacuum of my brief silence. And all the men that I have been associated with in my life from college boyfriends to my husband and his prosecutors were suddenly rushing to everybody’s mind including the audience and myself. But the incongruity of the comparison became immediately apparent and that is why everybody started laughing. What is fascinating about that moment is that none of the analogies were fleshed out, they were simply sketches of what might be and that’s what made them more powerful than the mundane and stressful reality.”

And she would have told the absolute truth! But she couldn’t because the folk theory that all analogies are always complete is simply too powerful and bloggers such as The Politico, the Fox reporter, or this NY Post headline writer would have jumped to even stronger conclusions. This negotiation of analogy boundaries is very common in public discourse and these limits are very fluid. The problem for the public discourse is that its participants are operating under the folk theory that analogies are complete and an accurate representation of likeness or somebody’s belief about likeness. What this folk theory (along with many expert theories) fails to take into account is the indeterminacy or underspecification of all metaphor-like conceptualization. Not only are the mappings from one domain to the other partial, they are also of different levels of schematicity. And that means that sometimes they are going to lead into situations such as these where everybody in the room knows what is happening but it is impossible to talk about it later because in the process of metaphor hypostasis most of the underspecification disappears and is replaced by explicit mappings.

PS: The NY Post has an interesting quote from the ‘common man’:

"She was talking about Bill being a bad man. There was no doubt whatsoever," said Tyrone Williams, 55, an engineer from nearby Bettendorf, Iowa.