Fantasy Folklore Mythical Metaphors 101
Unicorn, The Midas touch, Leprechauns guarding pot of Gold at the end of Rainbow, El Dorado, Face that launched a thousand ships, Milli Helen, Trojan Horse, Gremlins in my Computer, Volatility Gremlins
Quoting Joseph Campbell, the author of a national bestseller The Power of Myth,
“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words.” The use of mythology in metaphorical usage is far more common than we realize. Here are some examples of mythical characters encountered frequently in corporate business and media English usage.
While some of us may delight in describing our bosses as fire-breathing dragons dangling Damocles’ sword over our heads or tying us into Gordian knots, the reality is probably much different than the Ogres or Frankenstein monsters chasing us down corridors with unreasonable demands that we may portray them to be.
While they may not constantly carry the weight of the corporate heavens on their shoulders like Atlas, they probably are doing some of the heavy lifting occasionally . It doesn’t take the Wisdom of Solomon to acknowledge that corporate bureaucracy can convert minor initiatives into Herculean tasks.
Mythical Creatures that Give
Midas Touch, Leprechauns guarding their pot of gold, El Dorado. Gnomes of Zurich
Have you seen entrepreneurs who seems to have the Midas touch – every venture they touch makes money or turns into a Unicorn or they discover hidden gems that no one else can? They don’t need a Leprechaun guarding their pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
How do Leprechauns earn their gold? By fixing shoes for fairies. Perhaps that is why their profession is considered to be that of a shoemaker and they are portrayed as fixing and shining shoes. They must be paid quite a bit to save up for that pot, because per a report by WalletHub, a social media network dedicated to helping users make smarter financial decisions, the current market value on a typical pot of gold is slightly more than a million. Even pollsters get in on the act by comparing the chances of winning the election for a specific politician to be worse than finding a leprechaun with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Speaking of guarding, are the so-called griffins of Artificial Intelligence guarding the treasure chest that is about to be unlocked onto Humanity? Similar to the dual nature of a griffin, could AI also open Pandora’s box? Per this article from Forbes, only time can tell which one will be unlocked.
Swiss bankers have been known to guard their own subterranean treasures in secrecy, and are referred to as Gnomes of Zurich because of the similarities with the mythical beings with pointed hats known for guarding hidden treasures. The phrase was first coined by a British politician emerging from a crisis meeting in 1964 discussing the plummeting pound. Some enterprising Gnomes of Zurich started answering the phone with the greeting of “Hello, Gnome Speaking” and a book was published by the same name in 1966. The bigger question facing the world today is if the legendary discretion of the Gnomes of Zurich will be maintained or if they will disappear into other emerging global hubs such as Hong Kong or Singapore ? If they do disappear, hopefully it will be temporary, just like the traveling gnome prank that became popular in the mid ’80’s. The phenomenon, popularized by the French 2001 movie Amelie, had gnomes disappear and returned back with photos of their travels in front of famous landmarks.
While those gnomes disappeared and were returned back, the legendary golden city of El Dorado has never been found. But as this BBC article questions, was El Dorado , the golden one, a place or a person? Or was El Dorado a state of mind? It probably depends on your state of mind on whether trading in private shares would be considered El Dorado or Fool’s Gold, per the linked article. Or has the new El Dorado shifted, at least for football players from Zimbawe? Is the new quest for El Dorado to find Lithium in Latin America? Perhaps, the quest is really to find the 100,000 pounds of gold from the El Dorado of the sea.
Mythical Creatures that Trouble
Gremlins have long been associated with causing unexplained behavior in airplanes. Around the 1940’s and with World War 2, the myth of gremlins became a marketing tool for the British wartime propaganda machine. Roald Dahl popularized them as creating mayhem in RAF plans during the Battle of Britain in his book “The Gremlins“. In 1984, Gremlins became associated with modern technology in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Gremlins“, which became a holiday classic. Today, the phrases “gremlins in my computer“, “tech gremlins”, “app gremlins” are fairly common. This WSJ article had an interesting take on the full form of “Glitch” which stood for “Gremlins Lurking in the Computer Hardware“. Mysterious trading glitches are often blamed on Gremlins and the term “volatility gremlins” is used to to describe how volatility impacts the growth of investment portfolios. The coaching world uses the term inner gremlin to describe the self-limiting inner critic or saboteur within you.
The face of Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships and caused a war in ancient Greek times . In today’s age, her countenance could probably do a lot more, per BBC. But only if her face didn’t have to be spotted in a crowd of one million strangers, which even the best facial recognition softwares struggle with. Helen was the inspiration behind the humorous unit, the milli-Helen, the quantity of beauty required to launch exactly one ship. While she may have been the catalyst for the war, it was the Trojan Horse that became the reason for the Greek’s success.
And so the next time you want to introduce a larger than life coworker as “The man, the myth, the legend“; pause for a second and think about what kind of mythical character you are alluding to.