Like what?
"[In his poems] there was an exuberance of metaphor and simile entirely original, and not in the least borrowed from any resemblance in the things compared." (George Eliot: Scenes of Clerical Life)
The whole idea of likening A to B is to provide the reader with a new angle on A, a way of looking at A that illuminates it via its partial ( Read more... )

Well now, there's an odd thing for a writer to say. After all, like any other writer, I have cut my teeth on mantras like "verbs make language move, adjectives clog it up". And in a general sense I still believe it. When I've written a poem, I still tend to do a rough count of the verb-adjective ratio, and I expect to find it about 2:1. If it were ( Read more... )

This is the text of my email to various Cardiff councillors, copied to the Western Mail, about the proposed cuts to the city's library service. If anyone's interested, there's a petition at https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/save-cardiff-library-service and the email addresses to contact are: newsdesk@walesonline.co.uk (Western Mail), Phil.Bale ( Read more... )

Metaphors do wear out sometimes, in the sense that the field from which the metaphor is drawn becomes unfamiliar, so that its meaning is no longer clear to those wishing to use it, and when that happens, the metaphor is liable to get changed. This makes sense, when it is changed to something that does carry meaning to the speaker. For instance, I ( Read more... )

Apparently one's nephews and nieces can be referred to, collectively, as one's niblings (by analogy with siblings but more endearing). I like this word. I don't know who invented it, or when, but it's always good when someone comes up with a word we didn't have and genuinely needed. Another such, I fear, is the unkind but forensically accurate ( Read more... )