1656 Si-Mile

Sometimes I encounter words, especially when they're used in a comparatively creative manner, and they make me smile. That's always how I pronounced simile when I was younger— si-mile. Because similes made me smile like bent over carpenter.
In any event, I was at a meeting not long ago and there was a pretty good speaker. He delivered a message on the state of our economy and more importantly, the economy of our state.
In the process, he used similes and another of those typical presentational verbal devices, the metaphor. He compared our economy to an ecosystem. And then proceeded to describe how the various components worked together to enhance the whole.
Ironically, our ecosystem economy is definitely in a hole.
All well and good, and interesting too that both eco-system and eco-nomy have the prefix "eco" in them. From the Greek word for house or environment—a very natural metaphorical comparison.
But then he went awry. He said that our economic ecosystem depended on four pillars. Therein was the mistake. He committed the dread "mixed metaphor" for which creative writing instructors always blasted our grades like a ton of bricks. For if he's talking about a plantlike ecosytemic metaphor, it would be based on roots not pillars.
Side question: eeco-sytem and eeco-nomic or echo-system and echo-nomic?
And another conundrum, speaking of metaphorical descriptors. Why is it "deep" asleep and "wide" awake? Shouldn't they be opposites? Wide is not the opposite of deep. High is the opposite of deep. So it should be deep asleep and high awake? Or if you don't like that, then come up with the opposite of wide for asleep.
Wide awake and narrow asleep.
Otherwise, I get as confused as a barrel of old people.
America, ya gotta love it.