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 010 – Gumilyov
I discovered this poem in my early twenties, possibly while first living and studying in China where I also got to know the poems of Osip...
Scribbles in the sand
In Couto's superb novel, a disturbed father tries to isolate his sons from life and learning by taking them to a remote place and denying them any...
Like the last of his life
Harold Bloom's comment on Hart Crane (1899-1932) is all the more poignant knowing that Crane considered some of his major work to have been a...
Poems for my family 009 – Milton
Surely one of the sweetest love poems of all time (alongside this one), in which Adam and Eve enjoy each other's company in perfect accord. These...
Second hand books
Virginia Woolf's comment on second hand books is for all those of you who love the look and feel of them, the randomness and surprise of finding...
Poems for my family 008 – Drayton
Listening time: under 5 minutes. One of the greatest love poems in English, this was written by Michael Drayton (1563-1631) the night before he...
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 components of story
This idea keeps coming back to me, and even though I question the components featured, intuitively it sounds right. Another pithy commentary on the...
Made up and yet true
A piercing rationale for the arts, if a rationale is needed. They are made up, but ...The paradox of the arts is that they are all made up and yet...
Brotherly bonding
Maxim Gorky had a brutally hard childhood, captured vividly in the first of his three memoirs. Among other losses, he saw two baby brothers die,...
The assignations of stories
An interesting way to present the connectedness of stories and their meeting points, and curious about the meeting at corners as opposed to other...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
A dam snake
Infrastructure likened to a curling serpent, whereas most serpentine similes I've seen have been speed-related. See Tarka the Otter, Christopher...
As ancient as …
As a simile for 'ancient' you could use a range of places and races, but here the intoning of the prayer makes 'Jewish' particularly appropriate. ...
As puny as …
An ideologically committed army officer expects her child to be born robust and struggle-ready, and is disappointed by his neo-natal vulnerability...
Like fluid sculptures
A fine idea to describe a flotilla of sail boats, as liquid sculptures, and note too that passing flock of egrets whose appearance is likened to 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.
Heart-drenching beauty
From Nicolson's superb book on Sissinghurst and his family's relationship with it, including its transition to more public ownership. He raises a...
Time-shrinking phrase
A striking triologism for a phrase which arrests and compresses time, as indeed, Heaney's does. '... monsters that stalk the night, in Seamus...
Ink-stained sky
Yesterday a storm-front passed towards the lake (Léman) and France, and from our window, we saw its 'ink-stained sky'. The new town spreads and...
Mist-mired horizontality
A surprising dimension to flat lands in winter - that they appear all the more horizontal when swathed in mist. Also like that alliterative...
Sky-cracking chiaroscuro
We've had a few rain-dousing days of storminess, and yesterday evening I enjoyed a sky-show of shifting banks of chiaroscuro cloud and light, as...
Sun-darkening arrows
Describing the shower of arrows at Thermopylae falling so thick and fast that they blot out the sun's light. Leonidas, the Spartan king, fell with...
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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