Chicken soup for the client
MANILA, Philippines - Sometimes even lawyers are moved to poetry.
Take attorney Ferdinand Topacio, a member of the legal team that announced the release of his client, former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, from military detention where she’s been held for eight months on charges of vote-rigging in the 2007 elections.
Topacio was buoyant upon GMA’s release, and full of simile:
“It is a reaffirmation of what our camp has been saying all along,” he told the New York Times, “that the charges against the former president are as thin as the soup made from boiling the shadow of a chicken that has been starved to death.”
The mind reels at the imagery: “Boiling the shadow of a chicken that has been starved to death.” It has a magic realist tinge to it, like something out of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. This Topacio paints pictures with his words, no doubt. And the judge who dismissed the charges against GMA as “weak” obviously agreed with the technical language of Topacio’s claim. That would, indeed, be some pretty thin soup.
But the phrase actually comes from farther west, uttered by one Abraham Lincoln long ago during a series of debates with Senator Stephen Douglas over slavery. The Lincoln-Douglas Debates were must-see entertainment back in 1858, kind of like a Pacquiao-Mayweather match would be today: people took horses, carriages and trains to watch these two men sound off in a series of seven public debates held in several states.
Lincoln was disputing Douglas’s claim that new American states could invoke the “Freeport doctrine” to make their own rules about slavery, ignoring Federal judges who had previously ruled in favor of it.
That argument, said Lincoln, was “as thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death.”
You can imagine the gasps, let alone the guffaws and chuckles, erupting among the audience members.
We no longer call it homeopathic soup, of course; and people outside of Illinois hardly ever boil pigeons. But the simile remains the same.
Of course, florid language is nothing new to politicians. Senators and representatives often lay it on so thick, you’d think they were being paid by the word. Even judges can run off at the mouth, as a certain Quezon City judge did some years ago when acquitting an “alleged” drug lord: “It is the serene duty of a court to skipper its judicial rig to anchor on the safe harbor of moral uncertainty, precisely within the limits of that uncertainty, neither undershooting the same nor indeed clawing hard onto the dangerous and rocky shallows.”
Feeling seasick yet?
But it’s not often that a lawyer resorts to simile. (Lincoln was, at the time, a self-taught lawyer, and a very colorful speaker to boot.) It certainly isn’t the language of legal briefs or courtrooms, but rather the language of crowing outside the courthouse, when a ruling has fallen in one’s favor.
And because such an occurrence is so rare, the phrase caught my attention. Wouldn’t it be fun if we could conjure up such convoluted similes in everyday prose? Very handy for texting excuses:
• “I can’t make it to the presscon today, the traffic is as thick as the triple-fried fat of an arteriosclerotic lechon.”
• “You pay for this round, pare, my wallet is as empty as the movie theater where John Carter played for a day.”
• “Pare, my head is pounding from last night’s San Miguel binge like a Hayden Kho home-video triple feature.”
• “I couldn’t finish my homework assignment, Teacher, because we had a brownout and our house was as dark as the soul of the guy who invented The Baconator.”
Similes can also be used to convey mathematical impossibilities:
• “Dude, your chances of picking me up are as remote as Khloe Kardashian slipping into a pair of jeggings.”
• “The odds of you making it in showbiz are as long as the Criterion Collection Director’s Cut of Tree of Life.”
• “Boss, the chances of me finishing all my work tonight are as slim as the shadow of Keira Knightley on a hunger strike.”
See? Poetry makes excuses seem so much more… poetic.
