"tiger" in Swedish means both tiger and "being quiet".
this might be lost on me because no such wordplay exists in any language i am familiar with.
A potential (contrived) example in English would be to use the notion of a strike in baseball as a covert communication for a worker strike. I could imagine signs and stickers made with an umpire making the strike hand gesture.
That's not completely contradictory, but maybe a self defense guide might use that imagery for instructing someone to strike an assailant. And there, a strike in baseball is literally missing the ball, or failing to strike the ball. So very opposite.
i was thinking back in wwii, if they had a "hush puppies" campaign in lieu of loose lips etc. - it probably would have been mis-processed in my mind as well. puppies = yapping. any other message would be swamped by the puppy noise.
my mind goes to the tangible, physical and spatial first, and the abstract/symbolic second.