A few months ago, I encountered a news article that referred to “laser-sharp focus.” I was amused by what I thought was a recombinant idiom, but then when I Googled the phrase, I was surprised to discover that it's in very widespread use, including in plenty of established publications.<\/p>\n
The original phrase, “razor-sharp focus,” makes more literal sense (though I know that's an odd thing to say about a metaphor): razors are literally sharp. But then again, when we say that focus is “sharp,” we don't actually mean sharp like a razor.<\/p>\n
So I went to the OED for a history of “sharp.” Originally (going back to Old English), it had to do with having a good edge or point for cutting or piercing. Not too much later, it developed a metaphorical meaning: “Acute or penetrating in intellect or perception.” And then a while later it started to mean having acute vision or hearing. And then: “Keen-witted and alert in practical matters, businesslike.”<\/p>\n
So by 1697 (the earliest cite listed for that last meaning, though I wouldn't be surprised if it had been used that way earlier), “sharp” has metaphorical connections to both vision and business. So I can imagine that could easily lead to the idea of someone's eyes having a sharp focus, literally and\/or metaphorically.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, it also began to refer to an image or object having clearly delineated edges, and by 1883 there's a reference to a photographic image being sharp. So that's an image with a sharp focus.<\/p>\n
And then somewhere along the way those uses of “sharp” relating to vision and\/or images got combined with the metaphorical comparison to a razor (Thackeray referred to “Epigrams that were as sharp as razors” in Vanity Fair<\/cite> in 1848, though presumably that's not the first use of that phrase). Seems like a natural combination, a way of saying that the focus is not just sharp but very sharp—but still, it's a bit of a mixed metaphor.<\/p>\n And then along came lasers.<\/p>\n And lasers are sharply focused light.<\/p>\n Well, okay, lasers are actually coherent<\/em> light. But it's easy to think of them—not in a scientific sense, just looking at them from a lay perspective—as being a very sharply focused beam of light.<\/p>\n Also, lasers can be used to cut, and an edge produced by a cutting laser seems (at least in the popular imagination) like it ought to be even sharper than the edge of a razor.<\/p>\n So it makes perfect sense to start with the idea of a “razor-sharp focus” and then update it to the modern world and an idea of even greater sharpness, to creat “laser-sharp focus.”<\/p>\n And it actually makes the metaphor more coherent (if you'll pardon the pun).<\/p>\n So although I initially thought the phrase was a little goofy, taking an already somewhat over-the-top metaphor and magnifying it, I'm now really pleased with it. It takes a longstanding phrase that consisted of two somewhat incompatible metaphors, and it intensifies (heh) the metaphor while also making it more consistent.<\/p>\n (Originally wrote this in February 2012, but didn't post it 'til now.)<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few months ago, I encountered a news article that referred to “laser-sharp focus.” I was amused by what I thought was a recombinant idiom, but then when I Googled…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-metaphors"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}