Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes. Enjoy!
A minstrel of defeat
An extraordinary idea: a minstrel of defeat, and even more so when used to describe an unpleasant smell of cooking. ...
Perlerorneq
May you be ever spared this suffocating, madness-inducing winter depression. Lopez describes the misery or insanity it can bring on,...
Joy’s handsell
This rare word refers to 'a new year's present to wish good luck', or a foretaste, as used in George...
Scavenger-like faculty
No detail is too small to be filed in Steerpike's sharp, archival mind; all may prove useful for eventual manipulation,...
Lop-eared rabbits
What a fine word, 'lop'. You can see these droopy-eared pretty creatures lolloping around the melon patch.
'Lop-eared rabbits basked...
Ebbs and flows of the soul
A journal as a beach gathering shells, seaweed and pearls washed up by the soul in the course of a...
Poetry as recall
Slowly I’m building a collection of quotations defining poetry. With a few more in the bag, we can lay them...
Potent as…
I vote for this to enter standard speech, even if you question the power of a pope in modern times....
OK in bits, but not on the whole
This is a classic case of ‘damning with faint praise’. The individual’s component bits just made it to ‘very nice’...
An excellent precaution
Long gone the days of bedbugs and room tics, when a lady might think to travel with her own linen. Still,...
On spherical emotions and the need for adjectives
Never thought of emotions as spherical before, but grasp the need for their many-sided expression. And the fact that emotions...
Barriers to hope
I like this metaphor in which a looming shape in the fog evokes a barrier to hope. That said, may...
May you make the welkin ring!
A literary term for the sky or heaven, from Old English welcin meaning ‘cloud or sky’ and related to Dutch wolk...
The liberating influence of a river
I like the idea of a river's motion and indefinite length as being liberating. But I'm pondering corresponding aspects of...
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