Dive in, splash around, skim and dip and spout about the latest quotations, metaphors, words and, of course, triologisms. You’ll feel better for it!
The magpie writer
Guilty as charged - I had a sense of recognition when I read this. Sometimes it feels less as if I have ideas for writing than that ideas accost me...
The magic of books
A beautiful description of what makes books so magical. May all yours be capacious of promise, even as they fit in your coat pocket. It's part of...
Fairy Tales and Legends of the World
On the cusp of a new decade, I've turned some new year resolutions into ten-year readolutions. One of them is to read 1000 fairy tales, folk tales,...
Poems for my family 012 – Thomas
Listening time: under 4 minutes. A poet describes the driving force of his art, not one of fame, trophies and applause, but rather the 'common...
Once Upon a Time & Far Away
Another collection of fairy tales dating from my sixth Christmas, a gift from my mother.  This one has exuberant illustrations by Anton Kolnberger,...
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
A beloved possession, this book was given to me by my mother for Christmas 1969, when I was six. You can just see below her dedication in the...
A quote to note
Drawing on thousands of sparkling, moving and inspiring quotations amassed during decades of attentive reading. To delight your mind and spirit and improve your presentations beyond belief.
The loss of safe space
A piercing definition of where authoritarian regimes can end up: an all-controlling totalitarian nightmare, regardless of the underlying ideology. ...
The earth in the palm of your hand
A superb description of maps, by Beryl Markham, one of the 20th century's most intrepid travellers and pilots. A map in the hands of a pilot is a...
How to host house guests
A charming insight into the levels of luxury which could be visited upon an upper echelon house guest in the early 20th century. Will endeavour to...
Spoons for swine
A revealing aspect of Svetlana Alexievich's interviews with Russian people, conducted first in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, and...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
A booming voice
A novel pair of similes to convey a loud, hard voice, including those weighted final syllables. Â "Congratulations!" said the father, his voice...
The effect of someone’s presence
A lovely simile to describe the effect of one person's presence on another. Her presence filled him through and through, like the sweet breeze blown...
As if …
Flying a tiny, fragile aircraft on a reconnaissance sortie, Saint-Exupéry finds the rudder has frozen, and nearly gives himself a heart attack...
As indispensable as …
A life-line for a Second World War pilot was the rubber tube. Saint-Exupéry's account vividly describes the physicality and encumbrance of flying a...
Triologisms
Bringing you pithy, evocative imagery in the form of three-legged microcosms of meaning. Updated on Tuesdays … Tuesday, triologism day!  You’ll never see this day of the week in the same way again.
Wind-tousled sky
This is from a few lines of Seamus Heaney's prose in which he imagines how Philip Larkin might have approached writing his own version of The Divine...
Wedge-shadowed gardens
Two superb triologisms in a few lines of Larkin - I like his wedge-shadowed gardens and then the Brontean empyrean which follows. I part thick...
Stone-smooth sky
This caught my eye simply because I can't recall having seen such a sky, and can scarcely imagine it. Clouded, but that doesn't align with...
Sea-clap music
Seamus Heaney's comment on a poem by Sylvia Plath conveys something of the shore-scouring slaps and soughs of it: And it is indeed a pleasure to...
Rain-sodden gallowglasses
Seamus Heaney describes an Ulster of: ... hill-forts, cattle-raids, and rain-sodden gallowglasses where Hugh O'Neill was born and to which, after...
Mote-lit stillness
Commenting on some poems by Edwin Muir, Seamus Heaney says: They return us, a little too unscathed, to the mote-lit stillness of the cradle and the...
Words
Sharing words that sparkle, appeal, intrigue or otherwise grab me, including in other languages. And adoring alliteration, words are added on Wednesdays… Wednesday, word day. See you back here then.
A deceit, a descent and a parliament
As you may know, I have a soft spot for imaginative collective nouns, and although I'd come across 'parliament' for owls, and love the whooshing...
Lauzengier
Lauzengier (also 'lauzenger') appears in the songs of French troubadours. Â An old Occitan word but surely one which it may be timely to pluck from...
Gulch it down
Mervyn Peake uses Rabelaisian vocabulary to describe the gargantuan appetites and appearance of Swelter, the castle cook in his Gormenghast trilogy....
Mummarella
You would know the 'true' octopus if you saw it, wouldn't you? Reading a book about Mediterranean seafood, Luiz learned that according to an...
Ullage of sunflower
Something about this word that you can roll around the mouth like a good swig of wine or cognac, the removal of which would result in its ullage in...
Cragfast
Stuck?  In a tight corner? No going forward ... or back? Call yourself Cragfast. A sheep cornered on a crag, to starve in the absence of rescue....
I find it moving that no literary text is utterly original, no literary text is completely unique, that it stems from previous texts, built on quotations and misquotations, on the vocabularies fashioned by others and transformed through imagination and use. Writers must find consolation in the fact that there is no very first story and no last one. Our literature reaches further back than the beginnings of our memory permits us, and further into the future than our imagination allows us to conceive, but that must be the only barrier. Â
Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 139
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