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.

Great Comparisons

Coming across an original simile or metaphor is one of the small joys of reading. Here are a few from Sarah Blake's The Postmistress:

"Like a stone tossed into a flock of birds, talk startled swiftly into flight whenever the new postmaster was mentioned."

"Large and handsome...in a good silk dress, Mrs. Cripps stood like a striped tent without an occasion...."

"The gulls rose up suddenly off the pylons on the pier, the swift beating of their wings like hands shuffling cards."

"Up ahead of her, six white cottages the size of playhouses lined up like girls regarding the gentleman caller come at last to the dance."

"The boys and their talk made her feel still more invisible, like a balloon at the end of a longer and longer string, held by no one. Floating off."

"Every afternoon, he turned around and walked back out as quietly as he had come in, with the exhaustion of a man who hurled himself against the wall of each passing day, and would do so again and again, until the wall broke."

No comment needed, other than the wish that such gems not go unnoticed by readers, and that we writers take the time to replace the cliches that slip so easily into our work with original language like Blake's.

I'll be posting a review of this book shortly on my other blog, Book Talk.