English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I saw this sentence in an online article.
Like its predecessors—the Countach, Diablo, and Murciélago—the Aventador SV is an impossibly wide, ridiculously low-slung blade of a car, with doors that scissor skyward and a huge V-12 behind the seats.
I know blade means a dashing man, but not sure it applies here. None of the word's definitions appear to fit here. What does it mean exactly?
Here's my guess. Blade doesn't have special meaning here. The car is being compared to a blade, like a sword blade. Blades can be "wide" or thin, and "low-slung" makes be think of a sword that's hung (or slung) on one's side so that it's low to the ground. I assume the car also rides low to the ground. I think the metaphor continues by saying that the doors "scissor" towards the sky. This also references the name "scissor doors". And the body is designed to cut (= move quickly) through the air, like a blade.
There's also a possible bullfighting reference, as apparently Lamborghinis are named after famous fighting bulls. From Wikipedia
The Lamborghini Aventador is a mid-engined sports car produced by the Italian automotive manufacturer Lamborghini. In keeping with Lamborghini tradition, the Aventador is named after a fighting bull. Aventador (pronounced [aβentaˈðoɾ]) earned the Trofeo de la Peña La Madroñera for its courage in the arena in Zaragoza, Spain, in 1993.
The pattern {noun1} of a {noun2} is a form of metaphorical comparison, where noun2 is being called a noun1.
He was a lion of a man.
It was a smokestack of a hat.
So the car is being likened to a blade (knife, sword, fan, axe, adze) -- something sleek and aerodynamic. It has very little ground clearance and has itself little height, like a blade lying with its broad side parallel to the ground.
They probably mean the front lower part of the car, which means there's almost no gap between the ground and the bottom of the car.
