When the words just won't come out of your mouth

"Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions." 

This sentence from James Geary's I is an Other, an exploration of metaphor, stopped me cold, but not because it was beautiful. The writing had been smooth until I got here, but suddenly I felt as if I'd stepped off a paved road into knee-deep mud. I looked back at the sentence to see why.

It wasn't that I had trouble understanding the meaning, but rather that the words, even when read silently, did not want to come out of my mouth. Too many long words? Too many s sounds? Three repetitions of the unlovely syllable "tions" followed by a "tious''? For all of the above, this sentence failed the read-aloud test for me--a test all good writing must pass. Every piece of writing has a unique voice, one we hear even when we're reading silently.

I'm happy to report that the clunky sentence wasn't typical of Geary's style, which is mostly clear and fluid and sometimes rises above the quotidian. Isn't that a great word?  "Metaphor," says Geary, "slips a pin into the quotidian." Here I like the contrast of short, simple words--no modifiers--with the four-syllable Latinate quotidian. The subtle assonance of the short-i sound (slips, into, quotidian) adds some music. The pin, as Geary explained in the previous sentence, stands for a prick of sensation. He goes on: "By mixing the foreign with the familiar, the marvelous with the mundane, metaphor makes the world sting and tingle." Three pairs of well-chosen words (foreign and familiar, marvelous and mundane, sting and tingle) use sound effects to make their point beautifully. All is forgiven.