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!
Poems for my family 003 – Donne – No Man is an Island
This is the third poem I chose to share with my family, copied out by hand and sent by post. Written as part of a series of meditations by John...
Poems for my family 002 – Frost – The Road Not Taken
This is the second poem I chose to share with my family, in what will be a series to be sent approximately once a month, hand-written and by post,...
Poems for my family 001 – Yeats – The Cloths of Heaven
The first time I heard this poem was when my mother recited it to my step-father in the kitchen. She had tears in her eyes but I wasn't...
Up hill and down dale
Gavin Maxwell chose to live in a remote house on a remote island in Scotland. Here he describes the extraordinary efforts made by the local postman...
Of pens and pencils
Listening time: under 3 minutes. This is a charming account of negotiating communist bureaucracy at the height of the Cold War. John Steinbeck and...
Life and Fate – documentary
Stumbled across this excellent documentary by Priscilla Pizzato, Life and Fate by Vasili Grossman (in French, with English subtitles) on 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.
Complexity needs simplicity
I liked this comment by a senior US army officer at an early Covid-19 briefing, though not sure how easy it is to deliver. This is an unbelievably...
An encounter with competence
One of the pleasures of reading Simon Winder, apart from his lightly worn, wit-woven erudition, is the passing comments regarding his failings and...
Laying on a spread
You may have noticed that I can't resist descriptions of feasts, be it fine breakfasts, picnics, or other spreads. Here are two of the most...
Zoo architecture
Always curious about the unwritten books people ponder, and I like Winder's quirkiness in noticing this obvious gap in the market. If anybody could...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
Sea the colour
I love different ways of describing eyes, and colours, and this one allows some range in its definition. Blue or grey or green, or somewhere on...
Emotions surfacing
A delicate description of unexpressed feelings becoming strong enough to be palpable, like a scent in the room. 'Hurt and affection were so close to...
Cryptic afterlife
Baron Franz von der Trenck (1711-49), despite dying young and in disgrace, somehow contrived to be preserved in long life unguents. I like the...
Of besieged landscapes
An unusual simile to describe a highly fortified landscape with a troubled history. For some wondrous word-paintings of beautiful landscapes in...
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.
Ocean-grey eyes
A lovely description of a woman's eyes but a woman who has a certain transparence to her, not a particularly strong or memorable individual, even if...
Peat-dark waves
A description of wild swans floating on the night sea. I like that Maxwell uses peat, a local material, to describe the nocturnal waves. 'All...
Half-strangled tones
For most of Banffy's Transylvanian Trilogy, Julie Ladossa is a vanished ghost of a woman, who left her husband and son for nobody quite knew what...
Mist-hung mountains
For ten years or so, Gavin Maxwell spent as much time as he could living in a remote cottage in the bay of a Scottish island, lovingly described in...
Shovel-shaped antlers
Recently saw a David Attenborough programme showing such flat-planed antlers. Here they are spotted in the forest regions of Transylvania. 'His...
Iron-grey menace
Sea-furies spinning into roaring squalls in minutes, crashing waves into the land like a ship's grey hull running aground. 'The suddenness and...
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.
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...
A pippin but not an apple
I always knew the word pippin to be a type of apple, but then came across a reference to 'the expression of his pippin face'. According to the OED,...
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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