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!
A beautiful flowing hand
The American chef Julia Child describes how her husband approached letter-writing in an age when trans-Atlantic telephone calls were prohibitively...
In this mottie, misty clime
Today is just as Burns describes in his poem 'The Vision', all 'mottie', misty and conducive to looking back and pondering time wasted. This verse...
Resurrection in barley
An astonishing image used by Seamus Heaney in his 'Requiem for the Croppies', as he explains here regarding the poem written 50 years after the...
Of abundant overflow
What causes creativity to spring forth? I like Seamus Heaney's idea that it is not so much reactive as a generous overflow from an abundant...
Schoolboy sketches
Maurice Cramer was a Geneva schoolboy who joined his classmates in August 1870 for a school trip to discover Champéry. It was common for such...
In my pocket, in my heart
From time to time I receive a long and handwritten letter from one of my brothers and I am long overdue in responding to him. I think this comment...
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.
Ancient travellers
Perhaps this is obvious, but it had never occurred to me in any conscious way, and I wonder how far it is true, as I have a romantic image of people...
Quail not
In the 1950s Louis Golding loosely followed the footsteps of Odysseus in a quest to reach Ithaca after three decades of detours. He occasionally...
Meat or fish?
On a delightful 20th century Odyssey to Ithaca, Golding is offered the choice of fish or meat. He explains what prompted him to opt for the...
The poet as compass
An enigmatic statement, perhaps born of the difficulty of pinning down Odysseus' journey on a real map, although there is no shortage of claims that...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
A circular accent
Seamus Heaney describes a circle to convey the sounds of the Ulster accent, drawing an image of tangential consonants and rolling vowels. ...
The honey of knowledge
This is from the first of a trilogy of memoirs by Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), whose life began in Tsarist Russia and ended in the Soviet Union. His...
As healthy as …
A bracing, surprising simile for presenting something as a picture of health and wholesomeness. Here it is about reading material, but it could...
Successful avoidance
George Eliot captures a moment in which two people deeply attracted to one another manage to feign indifference, each deriving satisfaction from...
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.
Frost-wrapped fields
Norfolk is a small Netherlands of flat land and soaring firmament, cloud-churned. My grandmother lived there for about a decade and I spent happy...
Gum-burning brandy
A toothache-anaesthetizing solution gives a jaunty air to this fun concept of the Dullest Exhibition-case Award. But lest you think Winder is...
Long-somnolent border
In the absence of functioning treaties or other guarantees of peace, let us pray for long-somnolent borders that they may remain in blissful...
Lacquer-black Vltava
Lovely vowel harmony in that 'lacquer-black', it deserves to entirely supplant the boringly bog standard 'pitch black'. Do me a favour and use it...
Brocade-trimmed orrery
The stereotype of the anally retentive chamberlain mechanically following a ritual timetable reminds me of Sourdust in Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan,...
Headache-inducing explosions
Now you know why the Jesuits' stupendously lavish baroque churches needed all those gilded churrigueresque curlicues, to better serve a didactic...
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.
Lauzengier
Lauzengier (also 'lauzenger') appears in the songs of French troubadours. 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....
Gummocks
This glorious word being no longer current, I invite you to revive it the next time someone does something daft or useless. Perhaps combine it...
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.
Source: Alberto Manguel, The City of Words, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press, 2007), p. 139
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