container metaphor

An object with an inside, an outside, and usually a line across it. Jar, tank, iceberg, vessel, bucket. You pour a proportion into it: what is filled against what is free, what shows above the line against what sits below. The container is the workhorse of this treatment because so many structures are really one quantity split in two. What it adds for free is walls. A jar's walls do not move, so the reader reads your limit as fixed even when the limit is a decision.

An object with an inside, an outside, and usually a line across it. Jar, tank, iceberg, vessel, bucket. You pour a proportion into it: what is filled against what is free, what shows above the line against what sits below. The container is the workhorse of this treatment because so many structures are really one quantity split in two. What it adds for free is walls. A jar's walls do not move, so the reader reads your limit as fixed even when the limit is a decision.

Example

Best when the content is one quantity split into a seen part and an unseen part, or a filled part and a free part.