Mass Primary Hysteria

Our colleague Titivil makes a good point regarding all the media hyperventilating over how today's primaries will gauge the "mood" of the voters.  How can a noun as amorphous and variegated as "Voters" be said to have a mood?  How can a convenient abstraction like the word "Voters" have a subjective mental state usually only attributed to individuals?  The answer is that they don't, but to speak as they do is a convenient reductionist metaphor that allows us to speculate as to a state of affairs that otherwise we'd have difficulty speaking about at all.  But when speaking in metaphors, remember that while they are useful for getting at the truth they are at base lies.  A metaphor is a qualitative attribution to something that doesn't actually have that quality.  Which is why politicians of all idiocies love them.