OK. You brought it up.
Or, as John Travolta says to the paint customer in Saturday night Fever, "You brung it up."
The spectre of a rolling Tide is a great, naturalistic metaphor.
Did you catch that? I said that this is a naturalistic metaphor.
Have you noticed? Probably you haven't, if you were born just a few years ago. The writers are now describing Alabama football by using the plural verb to predicate the noun Tide. For example: "The Tide want to win this one for the coach."
Well, do you realize what has happened? The writers have lost the naturalistic connotation of the word Tide. They are now using the plural verb because they are thinking of the Tide as a group of people.
Therefore, I must assume that these writers have spent the great majority of their lives in front of a computer, absorbing virtual reality rather than an appreciation of outside nature, where the majority of young men -- and even many young women -- spent their lives in earlier generations, when this mascot name, The Crimson Tide, was chosen to represent the Alabama football team.
Roll, Tide, to my mind, conjures up a large white-foam wave, crashing in onto the beach, sweeping over any and all in its path. That is cool.
What is not cool, in my opinion, is this modern, late-blooming practice pretty well universal among today's writers who cover the Tide, a confusion concerning a singular noun, apparently stemming from an ignorance of the originally intended word-picture -- of a natural, irrepressible force that comes upon opponents of the Crimson Tide.
:biggrin2:
