Moonlight raked the lawn

Years ago, I saw a discussion about a writer who had, allegedly without humorous intent, injected some surprising atmosphere into a story by saying that "moonlight raked the lawn".

The contributors to the discussion all recognised the silliness of the metaphor, and vigorously tried to analyse the nature of this gaffe — without, it must be said, achieving any great insight.

In the process, what became clear is that few people could invent other metaphors that produced the same type of comic effect. I find myself still interested whether there's a concise name for a metaphor with this type of failing. More interesting for me, how can a linguistic trick whose humour is so intuitively understood have so few ready examples?

Solution 1:

Lost violin found by tree.

Bridge held up by red tape.

The old fashioned name for this is Amphibole. There is renewed interest in the form due to the work being done on machine translation. Amongst this brotherhood it is known as global semantic ambiguity if both meanings make some sort of sense.

General MacArthur flies back to front.

is a similar figure (also an Amphibole) known as Global Syntactic Ambiguity.

Fowler and pre-1980 dictionaries call this Amphibole: Merriam-Webster now calls it Amphiboly,or Amphibology.

Definition of AMPHIBOLOGY : a sentence or phrase (as “nothing is good enough for you”) that can be interpreted in more than one way

Oxford on line also now calls it Amphibology

For more informatio see http://au.wow.com/wiki/Amphiboly and for more entertainment see site::: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=0