Questions tagged [wording-choice]
Questions about a writer's precise selection of words as determined by a number of factors, including denotative and connotative meaning, specificity, level of diction, tone, and audience.
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Why are all the schoolchildren referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
Clint Smith's poem "The Gun" describes a school shooting from the perspective of a child. However, the central character, as well as its fellow classmates, are all referred to as "guns&...
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In Ozymandias, who is the "ye" in the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" meant to be addressing?
Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is a well-known and oft-referenced English-language poem from the early 19th century, and purports to quote — presumably in translation from Egyptian hieroglyphs — a ...
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Why do the Pern novels use regular words as profanity?
In the Pern novels, characters use words that would normally be innocuous as profanity. Some prominent examples are "shards" and "shells". There's a list of in-universe curse ...
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Why does the Lady of Shalott stay instead of stray?
In Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" there is the following verse:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she ...
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Where did the term Kwisatz Haderach in Dune originate?
I've always been curious how names and words are created in literature. Having finished the main Dune books last year, I was thinking how the term "Kwisatz Haderach" came about. Did Herbert make it up,...
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Symbolism of "hot gammon" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
I'm reading T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read for free online) and one particular line stuck out at me:
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they ...
user111
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Why are there three different versions of the "solid/sullied/sallied flesh" line in Hamlet?
While looking up about the passage asked about in this previous question, I noticed that there are different versions of the same line in Hamlet, Act I Scene II, line 333:
O that this too too solid ...
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Why is the king 'baffled' in "Hallelujah"?
At the end of the first verse of "Hallelujah"...
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
I take it the king is referring ...
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Did Philip Larkin use a swearword while quoting from Pym's Excellent Women?
In a letter to Barbara Pym dated 18 July 1971, Philip Larkin allegedly wrote:
I reread Excellent Women before coming away—what a marvellous set of characters it contains! Sometimes it's hard to ...
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What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
In T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read online), T. S. Eliot claims that someone (probably either humankind or the reader) only knows "a heap of broken images".
What are the roots ...
user111
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Why is a "cucumber sandwich" specifically used as what English faith has "only just enough teeth to get through"?
In Chapter 34 of The Kingdoms, Kite goes on this musing about religion:
The golden dome of the cathedral at Cadiz showed, just. He had been trying not to stare at it as much as he'd been trying not ...
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What does "kettle at the heel" mean in this Yeats poem, "The Tower"?
What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
...
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"Miss" as a form of address to a married teacher in Bethan Roberts' "My Policeman"
In Bethan Roberts' 2012 novel My Policeman, Marion Taylor begins working as a schoolteacher in 1957. She writes her name on the chalkboard for her students:
A moment passed as I gathered myself, then ...
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Why Pallas in "The Raven"?
In Poe's famous poem "The Raven", the eponymous bird, after tapping on the narrator's window, steps smartly inside and perches upon a bust of Pallas.
Why Pallas? As far as I know, this ...
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Language in A View from the Bridge
In page 33 of the play "A View from the Bridge" by Arthur Miller, Eddie describes Rodolfo saying he:
looked so sweet there, like an angel – you could kiss him he was so sweet
and
Paper Doll ...
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1
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What is "vulgar white of personal aims"? Why is it "white"?
From Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:
'I have not stood long on the strand of life,
And these salt waters have had scarcely time
To creep so high up as to wet my feet.
I cannot ...
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Use of "pounds" instead of "roubles" in passage of "The Idiot"
In the 1st Chapter, Part I of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (Eva Martin's translation) you can find the following passage:
These men generally have about a hundred pounds a year to live on (...)
In this ...
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In Macbeth, why is Fleance 'scaped?
I've always been curious about the precise phrasing of this line from Macbeth, spoken by the First Murderer:
Most royal sir, Fleance is 'scaped.
The meaning of this, and as far as I can tell the ...
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Origin and significance of E-I-E-I-O in the Old MacDonald song
The well-known children's song "Old MacDonald had a Farm" has lyrics in the following format:
Old MacDonald had a farm
E-I-E-I-O !
And on that farm he had {article} {singular or plural ...
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What does Lady Macbeth mean by "what thou art promised"?
In Macbeth Act I Scene 5, Lady Macbeth says the following:
Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be
What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full o' the milk of human ...
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"Marry, in her buttocks: I found it out by the bogs."
From The Comedy of Errors, Act III Scene II:
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: No longer from head to foot than from hip to hip: she is spherical, like a globe; I could find out countries in her.
ANTIPHOLUS OF ...
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Where can I take a deeper dive into Jane Austen's vocabulary?
I'm translating some Jane Austen into Latin, and I'm wondering whether there's a resource that would allow me to do a deeper dive into the nuances of the vocabulary she uses, especially the words that ...
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What can be gleaned from Lovecraft's usage of the words "obscene" and "blasphemous"?
Throughout his collective writings, the author H. P. Lovecraft makes frequent use of the words "obscene" and "blasphemous" in order to convey a sense that something is the object ...
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Why did Emerson choose 'hobgoblin' in his quote 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'?
Ralph Waldo Emerson said:
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.
I understand the quote. But Wikipedia doesn't explain the origin of the following signification? It differs from the ...
user175
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1
answer
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Why is Philoktetes specifically hunting "doves"?
I am reading James Scully's translation of Philoktetes (also known as Philoctetes), in The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully. Twice it is mentioned that the ...
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Bad Grammar in The Great Gatsby?
I'm sure many here have encountered a common error in written English, whereby 'have' is substituted by 'of'; 'should of', 'would of', 'could of', etc. It's my understanding that this is always ...
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Comparing frequency of word use across Shakespeare's plays
There are numerous concordances that list all of the words, and their frequency of use within each of Shakespeare's plays. However, I am interested in the presence and frequency of use of words across ...
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Why are pronouns used in this way in Nalo Hopkinson's "Shift"?
I just read the short story "Shift" by Nalo Hopkinson, which is freely available online. It's a modern, Caribbean-themed story inspired by Shakespeare's The Tempest.
One thing which confused me on ...
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Why does Ray Bradbury use "flounder" for an action with a positive outcome?
From "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury:
It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed ...
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Why does Shelby Foote use the phrase "airline miles" in The Civil War: a Narrative?
In The Civil War: a Narrative, Shelby Foote periodically uses the phrase "airline miles" to mean "distance on a straight line." I can't recall offhand hearing this phrase anywhere else; why this ...
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Why is snow compared to "ash" in the poem "Snowfall"?
"Snowfall", by Ravi Shankar, has this as its first verse:
Particulate as ash, new year's first snow falls
upon peaked roofs, car hoods, undulant hills,
in imitation of motion that moves the ...
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Why is Helen's speech here in the Iliad described as being given "warmly"?
In Book VI of The Iliad, when Hector has come to try to get Paris to fight, Helen chips in with her point of view:
Hector answered nothing, but Helen said warmly:
"Brother dear, I am ashamed; I ...
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What does 'trusting sorrow' mean here?
I read the poem 'A Roadside Stand' by Robert Frost, and I have accumulated a few questions through the poem. So, I will be posting some questions from the same poem, if you can please answer my other ...
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Context of "swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow"?
I go, I go; look how I go,
Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow.
-- Puck, Act III Scene II, A Midsummer Night's Dream
This is a well-known line from a Shakespeare play, but did Shakespeare ...
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Why does Mersault say "Hello image!" to his girlfriend?
I have read the novel A Happy Death by Albert Camus. In this novel Mersault (the absurd hero) at one point says to his girlfriend, "Hello, image!". I am wondering why he calls his girlfriend "image". ...
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A real meaning of a Bramarbas or a Holofernes?
Before long the madness of intoxication broke out; they attacked one another with fists and knives, and it looked as if they would do murder. Suddenly the Saltmaster’s son, who had stood looking on, ...
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What does "atom" mean in Don Quixote?
This is a question about Don Quijote de la Mancha (Edición conmemorativa de la RAE y la ASALE / 400th-anniversary commemorative edition by the Spanish language academies).
In Chapter XXVI of the ...
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What does Hamlet mean when he calls Claudius a "villain"?
In Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet, prince Hamlet repeatedly calls Claudius a "villain". Here is a quote from Act 2 Scene 2 :
Bloody, bawdy villain! Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, ...
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Do word replacements in "A Clockwork Orange" affect the interpretation of the book as a whole?
Recently, I started reading "A Clockwork Orange" in English. A feature of the book that jumped out at me was that a lot of words used by the main character are adapted from Russian.
Since I am a ...
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What did G. K. Chesterton mean by this sentence from the first chapter of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'?
Walking in wind and sun in the very landscape of liberty, he was still young enough to remember his politics and not merely try to forget them.
I want to make sure that "the very landscape of ...
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Why does Sara frequently describe herself using derogatory words in Pack Challenge?
Someone recommended Pack Challenge by Shelly Laurenston to me. It's erotica FYI--not really sure if this is the place for questions about that, but I thought I would try anyway. The main character has ...
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Why did Hamlet tell Ophelia: "Get thee to a nunnery!"?
In Hamlet [III, 1], Hamlet tells Ophelia (lines 1814,27,34):
Get thee to a nunnery! […] Go thy ways to a nunnery. […] Get thee to a nunnery. […] To a nunnery, go; and quickly too. […] To a nunnery, ...
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Harry Potter German translation - use of word "Eingeweide"
I am currently reading (aloud with my kids) the German translation of the Harry Potter series and I am a bit surprised that the German word 'Eingeweide' is used so often. 'Entrails', 'guts', 'bowels' ...
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Why are the lotos-eaters "mild-eyed" and "melancholy"?
In Tennyson's famous poem "The Lotos-eaters", a group of mariners find themselves on an island inhabited by "Lotos-eaters", and themselves decide to stay after eating lotos has had ...
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What does it mean to "graze on the fizzy air"?
This is from James Scully's translation of Aias (also known as Ajax), in The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully.
Dear boy
may you be ...
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What did G. K. Chesterton mean by these two paragraphs from the first chapter of 'The Man Who Knew Too Much'?
'Jenkins,' he repeated. 'Surely you don't mean Jefferson Jenkins, the social reformer? I mean the man who's fighting for the new cottage-estate scheme. It would be as interesting to meet him as any ...
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Why call them the "little pointy hours"?
This is the start of James Parker's "An Ode to Being Read To", which is in October 2022's The Atlantic.
I fixed my insomnia with whiskey and audiobooks.
Seriously. I was a terrible non-...
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Why are the non-fellow-students not referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
This is sort of the reverse of my previous question on Clint Smith's poem "The Gun". While it's blatant about referring to all of the kids as "guns", I find it interesting that the ...
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Which does this part refer to, a pencil or the words?
I’d like to ask about the sentence in The Red Circle by Conan Doyle.
The words are written with a broad-pointed, violet-tinted pencil of a
not unusual pattern.
This is uttered by Holmes when he saw ...
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2
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Why are "doves" used in this simile from "Aias"?
This is from James Scully's translation of Aias (also known as Ajax), in The Complete Plays of Sophocles, translated by Robert Bagg & James Scully.
Son of Telamon, rock of Salamis
towering up ...
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