Carrots and Sticks --- Your acknowledgement, Andrej, of the carrot on a stick image is greatly appreciated. This metaphor has provided a derivative metaphor of “carrot or stick”. The “carrot on a stick” carries the meaning and clear implication of “persuasion”. However, this “carrot” is an inducement that is impossible to realize

Visualize a donkey-drawn cart where the driver dangles the carrot on the end of a stick towards which the donkey continues to trudge interminably.

Few writers have depicted this image in words so well as Dante Alighieri in his Divine Comedy. Part II is set in the seventh circle of Purgatory where the gluttonous must starve in sight of unreachable fruit hanging from trees above them. In my circumstance it would probably be chocolate-covered fruit.

The “carrot or stick” metaphor has become the popular choice of contemporary language. It implies both a positive inducement of the carrot and the negative consequence of the stick; specifically, the stick is employed if the carrot does not induce a behavioral change that conforms with the directed goals.

There are all sticks and no carrots in the first two parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Part III of the Comedy is where we enjoy reading of the divine fruit attained through the soul’s journey to Paradise.

Source author: John D. Hipsley jhipsley@igc.org