hi, fred miller! Welcome to the 'Cat!

:::Wow! my wierd musings started a discussion that's being referred to in 'outside' forums in less than 24 hours?! I'm humbled (better not put my foot in my mouth!).:::

I think your A-->b, b-->C, A-->C formula is what I was trying to get to above, with the five wizemen and the elephant analogy. The wisemen may have failed, because, as McGrath said: they didn't start with an idea of the elephant as a whole, but if none of them had ever seen or heard of an elephant that idea didn't exist for them or for the magistrate to whom they were reporting their findings.

To insert them into your formula, they're the b in the equation. The storyteller and listener are A and C, though, and the wisemen and the foolish magistrate are an allegory (a metaphor in narrative form) for pigheadly insisting that your perceptions of the world are the absolute truth. Before Van Gogh put brush to canvas he knew the truth about the swirling stars that you may not have -- until you view that painting and get a chance to share that view.

It's the same way with the storyteller (or songwriter) and the audience. The storyteller knows that no matter how much faith we put in the idea that what we experience is hard and fast reality, our senses can decieve us, and the more 'expert' we are, the more likely we are to be fooled, and lead us far, far astray. Saying that outright to passersby on the street would get that storytellier locked up in a loony bin, so she draws on the poor, oblivious wisemen as a common acquaintance.

The different mixed metaphors in a song or story may not fit together when they stand on their own, but they never do sand on their own, really, the storyteller and audience is always there, and their it's their relationship that forms a context that links all the 'mixed' metaphors on some common ground (Which may be why the metaphors in "Waly, Waly" don't jar as much when sung as when read off the page).

To use your expansion of metaphor to include symmatry, let me try to explain the idea for the song that I was talking about above again:

A song is like X, Love is like X, Love is a Song. Therefore Love is a Song and X.

Now, saying that Love is a Song and X right off the bat does make it a mixed metaphor. But is it still a mixed metaphor if we include that middle link that puts it in a new context? Or does Song + X = one complex metaphor (would that be a meta-metaphor)?

I just have to find just the right metaphor to put in X's spot...