Like a political comet, Rob Ford rocketed to victory on a tidal wave of suburban discontent and the appeal of his Everyman persona. He was also armed with a powerful weapon: figurative language. “Stop the gravy train,” an idiom he had been using for years, hammered his penny-pinching message into the public consciousness.

Ford’s success with non-literal phrases has continued into his roller-coaster mayoralty and his uphill quest for re-election. They are written into his prepared remarks once in a blue moon. Most of them pour from him as easily as water from a tap.

The gaffe-prone mayor and his gaffe-prone brother, Councillor Doug Ford, have never been called Churchillian orators. But they share a rare gift for vivid metaphors, similes, analogies and idioms that stick like glue in voters’ minds.

“Whatever you say about the Ford brothers, they have a knack for being able to communicate powerfully and effectively while encouraging the reader or listener to draw a conclusion that wasn’t exactly said,” says Jonathan Rose, a Queen’s University professor who teaches political communication.

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·Rob Ford figurative quotes, categorized

When the mayor was asked about his health and sobriety after a stint in rehab, he did not say he was healthy and sober. He said he was “healthy as a horse,” “sober as a judge,” and, later, “clean as a whistle.”

When his mayoralty was teetering on the brink in a conflict-of-interest lawsuit in 2012, he did not say he was tough enough to carry on. He said, “You gotta have skin on you like an alligator.” When he was faced with new conflict allegations this summer, he said, “They’re grasping at straws, literally scraping the bottom of the barrel.”

He opened his radio show by promising “more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” He called his opponents “two steps left of Joe Stalin.” He said he would achieve his policy agenda by “pounding the ball five yards at a time.”

Many of the Fords’ figurative phrases are related to sports. (“Stanley Cup winners don’t hand back the Stanley Cup.”) Many others invoke serious violence. (“He wanted to go out and put a big political bullet between the mayor’s eyes.”) There are a bunch about animals (“poorer than a church mouse”), food (“the proof is in the pudding”) and, curiously, ships (“batten down the hatches”). Not all of them make sense.

“You guys have just attacked Kuwait,” the mayor said, vowing revenge, when council was about to strip him of many of his powers, though Kuwait was unable to defend itself against Iraq’s 1990invasion and had to be rescued in 1991 by the. . .

. . . that is not the point. The point of political metaphor is never literal accuracy. The point is to frame the way we think about the politician and his politics.

“Lodging these metaphors, which represent frames, in the minds of voters is the holy grail of political communication,” says Zack Taylor, a University of Toronto Scarborough professor who has studied the mayor’s voter base — Ford “Nation.”

At the most basic level, the Fords’ folksy language burnishes their just-folks image. Though all evidence suggests they are improvising most of their metaphors — “I can tell you they definitely are not scripted,” says the mayor’s spokesman Amin Massoudi — it’s clear as day that they are aware of the benefits of hamming it up.

“I admit I’m not a smooth talker, a polished speaker,” Rob Ford told Maclean’s during the 2010 campaign. “But a lot of people like that.” Asked about the debating style of opponent George Smitherman, he said, “I can’t make heads or tails what he says sometimes. As soon as you’re a smooth talker, something’s fishy.”

Heads or tails. Something’s fishy. Figurative, figurative, figurative.

Such language may be most useful to two politicians whose core constituency, numerous polls suggest, is composed of people with little education. The Fords’ words simplify complex problems into bite-sized morsels ready-made for people who pay little attention to council sausage-making.

“Political psychologists sometimes talk about how metaphors are used as cognitive ‘shortcuts’ for voters who are less educated and informed on the specifics of issues,” says Taylor.

“We have here food metaphors, we have a lot of sports metaphors, we have war metaphors. And those are all visceral, easy to digest — if you’ll excuse the metaphor — images,” says Rose.

Particular Ford phrases have particular uses. The football metaphors remind voters of the mayor’s past as a volunteer youth coach — and suggest tenacity and strength. The food metaphors remind voters that he is a big man comfortable in his own skin. The war metaphors portray him as a heroic lone soldier — and simultaneously vilify his opponents as belligerent aggressors.

“I think the use of sports, religion, and us-versus-them metaphors goes beyond creating the appearance of being homespun or authentic, which in itself may be a strategy to mask their wealth and privilege,” says Taylor. “It is also about creating the terrain on which the political contest occurs.”

All without having to explain much of anything.

“Many of the arguments that the Ford brothers make,” says Rose, “are not like syllogisms — they’re not ‘if this, then this, therefore that.’ They are syllogisms where one premise is missing, so you have to draw that missing premise. And that’s actually the most powerful form of communication.”

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For all his rhetorical might, the mayor is trailing in the polls, and he will have to scratch and claw if he is going to win again. He insists, though, that he has the momentum he needs to reach the mountaintop once more.

“We’re hitting on all cylinders,” he said on Wednesday.

On mobile? Click here to see a list of Rob Ford’s metaphors