Today I thought I’d examine a couple of hyperbolic metaphors on the basis of their being literally true and see where that got me, scientifically. I mean, what is a hyperbolic metaphor worth if science can’t say something about it, really? Check this out.

‘Enough food to sink a battleship’

How much food would sink a battleship? We have to suppose it
means enough food to overload the vessel until it sinks, but that doesn’t
define a figure because battleships have been built to all sorts of displacements, from
the 10,000-ton British jobs of the late nineteenth century through to the
70,000-ton Japanese monsters of the Second World War. Obviously the weight
needed to sink one will vary.

What’s less obvious is that even if we defined a