refagreat.blogg.se - Swifty meaning

'This paper deserves a C, not a B,' the professor remarked. 'I have to sweep up now,' the custodian maintained. 'It should be whom not who,' the grammarian objected. It is so-called because of Bongartz's signature invention: '"I'm dying," he croaked.' Here are a few of the author's croakers that suggest you'd better be careful about what you allow to rattle around in your mind: "The croaker, says Willard Espy in Almanac of Words at Play, was invented by the writer Roy Bongartz in the pages of the Saturday Review. Espy, The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary. 'I used to be a pilot,' he explained." (Willard R. 'You can't really train a beagle,' he dogmatized. 'I spent the day sewing and gardening,' she hemmed and hawed. Roy Bongartz developed Croakers, a variant of Tom Swifties in which a verb rather than an adverb provides the pun: (Charles Baxter, "'You're Really Something': Inflection and the Breath of Life." Bringing the Devil to His Knees: The Craft of Fiction and the Writing Life, ed. And we are accompanying these statements with a large inventory of pauses, facial gestures, body movements that can intensify or contradict the apparent meaning of what we're saying." "But most of the time we are saying what we are saying in a manner that isn't obvious. A Tom Swifty is an adverb tag that stupidly points up what is obviously there already. These writerly dialogue adverb tags were called Tom Swifties, in honor of those Tom Swift young-adult books for boys. "Often beginning writers are warned against telling the reader by means of adverbs how a person said something.(Ben Yagoda, When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It. You can find Web sites that list as many as 900 of them." Since then the Tom Swifty has trudged on, not exactly swiftly but with an impressive staying power. 'I only have diamonds, clubs, and spades,' Tom said heartlessly. 'I need a pencil sharpener,' Tom said bluntly. Examples would include: 'I can no longer hear anything,' Tom said deftly. "In February 1963, a lighthearted time, an anonymous writer at Playboy magazine invented a new type of pun: a fabricated Tom Swift-like line of dialogue in which the adverb modifying said humorously refers to or plays on the subject of the quote."How do I get to the cemetery?" Tom asked gravely."Let's visit the tombs," Tom said cryptically."Where are my crutches?" Tom asked lamely.

"I never did trust that buzz saw," Tom said offhandedly."You're only average," Tom said meanly."I'll have the shellfish," Tom said crabbily."I don't like hot dogs," Tom said frankly."This milk isn't fresh," Tom said sourly."I'll have the lamb," Tom said sheepishly."I can't find the bananas," Tom said fruitlessly."I'll have a bowl of Chinese soup," Tom said wantonly."I forgot what I was supposed to buy," Tom said listlessly.

"Let's get married," Tom said engagingly.

"That's a lot of hay," Tom said balefully.

"I'm a softball pitcher," Tom said underhandedly.

"I'm no good at playing darts," Tom said aimlessly.

You can listen to the official lyrics video for the song here. No wonder, then, that so many people have identified the poem with a profound loss they themselves have experienced. It was Geoffrey Hill who pointed out in one of his poems that elegies are often about the elegist as much as the elegised, and by extension, they are often as much about our own grief – the personal grief the reader of the elegy is suffering – as they are about the poet’s private loss. Whether it is a traditional elegy mourning the death of someone, or the death of someone who never had a chance to know life, we can only speculate. In the last analysis, ‘Bigger Than the Whole Sky’ is an elegy whose subject is never identified. Perhaps a divine power that was angry that the singer didn’t pray to him (her, it)? The notion is that fate had other ideas, and she and the addressee of the song were destined not to be together. Swift avoids this exact image – which has become something of a cliché in songwriting and elsewhere – in favour of a bird flapping its wings in Asia, but it’s clear what she’s alluding to. Swift also refers, in the song’s lyrics, to the so-called butterfly effect, whereby a butterfly flapping its wings (usually in South America) causes a ripple effect which alters the course of events thousands of miles away.