Dragging this thread back to its roots by the scruff of the neck, and mixing metaphors as a by-product ...
When the younger of my two sisters was about four years old, I was walking her home from Kindy one windy day. Along the route there was a park with a whole lot of young conifers growing at the bottom of it. The wind was making the conifers bend in turn, a kind of ripple effect, with the next ripple beginning before the last had ended, and the amount of bend per ripple being, of course, dictated by the strength of the wind gust.
Sarah was fascinated by the effect and we went and sat on the swings to watch it for a while.
"Oh look at the trees
bouncing in the wind!" she happily exclaimed. I was fifteen years old at the time, and that impressed the hey out of me, even then. It was such an apt and exact description of what was happening.
