Take a look above at the colorful balloons and the dapper man reclining midair.
Back in January we showed this crop from our Modern Metaphors puzzle, and noted that almost no one was able to correctly guess the metaphor that floating guy was meant to illustrate.
Many puzzlers guessed he represented the metaphor “armchair traveller.” And honestly? Excellent instincts. That answer absolutely scores — feel free to try it in our scorer if you haven’t already.
But, we added armchair traveler to our list of metaphors after people kept telling us that's what they were seeing there.
What was he supposed to represent?
Well, check out our floating gentleman’s rather bulldoggish build, his sardonic deportment, the famous cigar — why, that’s none other than Winston Churchill, and the metaphor at work here is Churchillian Drift.
A neologism coined by Nigel Rees in 1983, showrunner of the BBC Radio 4’s longrunning panel game show Quote… Unquote, Churchillian Drift describes our very human tendency to misattribute clever or weighty quotations to a handful of towering historical figures: Churchill. Twain. Lincoln. Einstein.
The wittier or more aphoristic the line, the stronger the pull to say "uh wasn't it Oscar Wilde who said that?".
"Never let schooling interfere with your education." - Not Mark Twain
The quote needn’t even sound like Churchill, and according to Rees, quotes "with a more grandiose or belligerent tone are, as if by osmosis, credited to Churchill."
It happens because pithy quotes need a pedigree, and seem more important and weighty if they came from a weighty important person.
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." - Not Winston Churchill
And back in the 20th century, you'll be shocked to hear people didn't have Google (or even the internet), so a confident misattribution could travel very far before anyone figured out how to check.
Relatedly, Stigler's Law of Eponymy (1980) is the tongue-in-cheek observation that no scientific discovery is actually named after its original discoverer. Of course, Stigler attributed the discovery of Stigler's law to someone else, the sociologist Robert K. Merton.
Churchillian Drift, then, is less a quirk of Churchill specifically and more a window into how authority works, how a name becomes a vessel that ideas pour themselves into, simply because the vessel is famous enough to hold them.
See if you can identify the other metaphors hiding in this crop… or, if you’re feeling ambitious, go big and tackle all 543 in our Modern Metaphors puzzle.