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A person is traveling dangerously fast on a rainy night with low visibility - traveling with reckless abandon in an already dangerous situation. What is the word that describes the literary sense in which this person is traveling towards (not spatially towards) an ambulance?

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  • Traveling like an ambulance? Hyperbole.
    – SEL
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 10:18
  • No, in some poetic sense the person, traveling with reckless abandonment, is traveling towards an ambulance. But "traveling poetically towards an ambulance" is not correct. Hopefully there is a word for this...
    – user3776518
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 10:26
  • Do you mean it's inevitable that they will have an accident (and therefore need an ambulance)?
    – Frank
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 10:29
  • No, perhaps they arrive safely. What I am looking for is to fill in the phrase "traveling ? towards an ambulance" while conveying "this person was just asking to get in a car crash" (in the idiomatic sense of "asking for it"). At this point I could write it differently but I want to learn whether there is a word for this
    – user3776518
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 10:32
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    You'd say 'He's heading for ...' rather than 'He's journeying towards ...'. It's certainly a journey metaphor, though.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 16:56

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The generic term for usages such as OP's example is...

figurative language
language that contains or uses figures of speech, especially metaphors.

figure of speech
any expressive use of language, as a metaphor, simile, personification, or antithesis, in which words are used in other than their literal sense, or in other than their ordinary locutions, in order to suggest a picture or image or for other special effect.

Personally, I incline to the view that all language is figurative - it's just some more than others.

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To flirt is to tease or trifle with a sense of temptation or seduction.

When you do something risky, you are figuratively posing a challenge, knowing that, with that challenge, there can be consequences (but that the consequences are by no means inexorable).

flirt with death, flirt with danger, flirt with disaster:

putting oneself in risky situations, where one possibly could die. For example, someone who rides a motorcycle too fast around hairpin curves could be said to be flirting with death. (from Yahoo! Answers)

flirt with the shark in sea,

flirt with the grim reaper: enter image description here (from waynoblog, http://waynocartoons.blogspot.com/2012/08/weapons-of-self-destruction-number-100.html)

By extension, to flirt with an ambulance is figuratively to act recklessly or carelessly and in a taunting, teasing fashion, offering a temptation or challenge that the ambulance might accept.

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Actual prepositions are pretty limited--at, to or toward (or the suffix -ward, as in ambulance-ward). An adverb seems called for, and the first ones that occur to me are inevitably, or inexorably (preferred). If you are writing poetry, however, you probably want to crank the rhetoric a notch or five. I would do this by use of an allusion, and the one that somewhat comically occurs to me (excuse my brain) is FDR's "rendezvous with destiny" which I would engineer to the driver's "inexorable rendezvous with paramedicry." See, you don't even really need the ambulance! =] ...to gurney or not to gurney, that was the question, and Schmedlap was rapidly answering it in the affirmative...

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    The "inexorable rendezvous with paramedicry" is beautiful but its not the ambulance, rather the traveling that I can't divest myself of - the driver's vector in some metaphysical (ie non-spatial or even temporal) space points at-or-near an ambulance. That is the crux of what I want to say. Still you helped me tease that out so you get the check :)
    – user3776518
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 11:32
  • You have taken the hard road, but let's pursue the travel then: how about something like "driving his Chrysler Intrepid madly through the mist, like a fanatic hurtling to meet his inexorable rendezvous with destiny, with that other vehicle whose flashing lights mark the place where the impatient are made patient, and slid into the tailgate like flatbread into an oven"...? =]
    – Kibitzologist
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 15:26
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traveling abstractly towards an ambulance

Will update the answer if anything more appropriate comes along

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  • I've never encountered such a usage. To be honest, I initially read that as abstractedly (=absentmindedly) - which would at least make sense, even if it's not the sense intended by OP.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Sep 27, 2014 at 13:03

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