Hell hath no fury like a reader whose grammar is scorned, discovers Russell Smith. The Babu agreed heartily and made other encouraging noises all the way up to the final paragraph, where he was brought up short. He has trouble envisioning speakers who pronounces “nuclear” correctly or who rescues a participle from dangling as “wildflowers in a threatened ecosystem”. There has to be a phrase for what happens when the mind comes up against a metaphor and crashes faster than a Microsoft product–how about “metaphorical blight”?