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 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...
The Mermaid & the Red Candle
As you may recall, in preparing for a new decade of life, I made a resolution to read 1000 fairy tales, legends and myths. This is the second book...
Poems for my family 011 – Stanton
Listening time: under 4 minutes. This delightful poem was written by a great uncle on our mother's side and reached me in a home-printed collection...
The library at Tyntesfield
Ever in quest of dream libraries, I was delighted to discover this National Trust article on their collections and libraries, including this photo...
Journal of joy
A delightful definition of journals, by one of history's most assiduous journal writers. A quote to share at the start of a new year, when our...
New year’s readolutions
Happy new year!  What will you be reading?  What do you wish to read? Feel free to send me a shelfie of your dreamed of selection. For...
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.
Use your imagination
The path to hell, we've been told, is paved with good intentions. Faludy, a renowned poet and writer, is given an extracurricular task to add to his...
War for kindness
Svetlana Alexievich's interviews with Russian people, first conducted after the fall of the Soviet Union, then again during the first decade of this...
Oh, for dog’s sake!
Listening time: 5 minutes. A touching account of mutual support and succour between labour camp prisoners and some of the camp dogs. In this and...
Which way the wind blows
In totalitarian systems, there is no limit to the perversity and pettiness of mind which can land you in a prison or a labour camp. Here, during the...
Metaphorically speaking
More marvelous metaphors on Mondays … Monday, metaphor day.
Flung into the fire
Saint-Exupéry, himself one of the fire-flung pilots of the French air force in the early, desperate days of the war, makes several damning...
Rolling like …
A stone? A wheel? No, Faludy goes one better, and I was lucky to find a roll-able coin stamped with the head of a king who lost his. ... and in...
Invisible but potent
A person who seems to have been entirely congruent in his memories and his values, fully dissolved and present in the telling of his story.  When...
Like pushing a pram
A fine description of a protuberant belly. I like the care with which the angry fat man moves it through a door. Mr Remy belonged to the rare...
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.
Liver-thick mud
A touching recollection by Seamus Heaney of a moment decades before which wedded him to a particular landscape. I like the description of gloppy...
Light-drenched empyrean
As I write this, we have been shrouded with a dense winter fog, and yet a sudden burst of sunshine is breaking through, and I am light-drenched -...
Head-clearing airiness
A few draughts of head-clearing airiness are a great way to start the new year. I also like Heaney's use of building similes in his response to...
Hard-won ledge
A sensitive commentary by Seamus Heaney on a poem by Sylvia Plath, 'Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor'. He describes: ... the drama of survival, the...
Gun-blue swingle
This quite literally striking triologism is from a poem by Robert Lowell (1917-77), which I discovered in a commentary by Seamus Heaney on Lowell's...
Rook-delighting heaven
Yeats looks up and is thrown by the sight of a wintry sky, suddenly overcome by an inpouring rush of memory, emotion, awareness of life's vitality...
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
Love writingredux.com? Â Enjoy our sister sites:
www.foolsareeverywhere.com  I   www.nuannaarpoq.com  I  www.spyderceleste.com  Â
© Beatrice Otto 2023 - design & content unless otherwise stated - all rights reserved