There have several Titanic cliches in the past few days. Time to give them their due!
First up is Hal Steger, vice president of marketing at Funambol who said:
“Symbian is a great platform, but it’s also huge. It’s the Titanic of mobile operating systems… lets hope it doesn’t suffer the same fate,” said Hal Steger, vice president of marketing at Funambol, which provides an open-source server-side platform used to synchronise data on mobile devices and PCs with Web-based services.
Titanic is to Symbian as water is to ice?
Total Telecom (Blog), Symbian Faces ‘Titanic’ Task To Go Open Source – Funambol, 16 June 2010
Second up is former US Interior Department Secretary Bruce Babbit on current secretary (and Obama appointee) Ken Salazar:
“I think Salazar is basically rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic,” Babbitt, who served as secretary for eight years under Bill Clinton, told Platts Energy Week.
Not very original. I wish I had a dime for every time the “rearranging deck chairs” cliche is used.
Mother Jones (Blog), Salazar “Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic” Says Babbit, 15 June 2010
Up next is a religious application. Southern Baptists are deciding on where to focus their evangelism. It sparked some internal debate as what was the best course of action. This prompted the following:
A former Southern Baptist president, Rev. James Merritt, compared the denomination’s present course to the Titanic sailing into an iceberg. “We’ve been sitting on our deckside lounges, watching this ship sail into the iceberg of declining baptisms, diminishing missions, and what is becoming a dead orthodoxy,” he stated.
AP via OneNewsNow.com, Southern Baptists Approve New Evangelistic Effort, 16 June 2010
Finally not all uses of Titanic are cliche. Consider the following from Reason Online:
Ending offshore drilling because of this oil spill would be like ending shipping because the Titanic hit an iceberg.
At least that uses Titanic in a meaningful way rather than as a cliche. Bravo to Jesse Kline for proving you can use Titanic without a cliche.
Reason Online (Blog), Calls Increasing to Punish BP, Halt Drilling, 16 June 2010