It’s hard to believe that I’ve been doing this for a year now. It really only feels like a few months ago. A really big thanks to everyone who’s been reading and commenting. I hope you’ve found something interesting and perhaps illuminating every now and then. It makes it much easier to put in the work to write regularly when you know someone’s going to read it, so thank you.
It’s a strange thing, writing.
You might know the story of the word Eureka. Or at least that it involves an old man in a bath. The ancient Greek scholar Archimedes reportedly stepped into his bath, noticed the water level rose. Realising that the water displaced must be equal to the volume of his foot, and that he had figured out a way to accurately measure the volume of irregular objects (which was a big deal at the time), he exclaimed Eureka! twice.
Synecdoche (the E is pronounced like in recipe) is a literary device in which a part of something is used to refer to the whole (or vice versa). It’s mainly considered a poetic device, and most examples that people provide are from poems. In this passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” for example, the word wave stands in for the sea:
The western wave was all a-flame.
The day was well was nigh done!
Almost upon the western wave
Rested the broad bright Sun
We use the word wave similarly when we use the phrase on the wave. Similarly, we can say a bird is on the wing when it’s flying. These are the two examples I was given when I was introduced to the term, back in, I believe, my final year of primary school. I was intrigued by this strange-sounding and -looking word, and wanted to think of other examples, though nothing really came to mind. I soon came to think of it as a purely literary device that was interesting, but not hugely relevant to my life. But now wiser and with a wider vocabulary, I can see that synecdoche is actually fairly common.
A big thank you to Payal Tyagi for nominating me for this award! You can find her fascinating blog here.
Here are the rules:
Carrying on from yesterday’s look at the NATO phonetic alphabet, I thought today I’d spend a little time thinking about the regular English alphabet in general. It’s something we take for granted, but there are plenty of interesting things about it. Continue reading
A red herring is a piece of information designed to distract or mislead one. It’s most often found in murder mysteries, specifically of the whodunit variety, in which the primary interest lies in figuring out the identity of the murder. A red herring in such cases is usually an apparent clue designed to make you think that someone apart from the actual murderer is the killer. All well and good, but what does any of this have to do with herrings? Continue reading
Following on logically from yesterday, I thought it’d make sense to provide a general style guide for writing blog posts. As I said yesterday, you can feel free to do your own thing, especially as there are different conventions for doing certain things. I just want to write about what works for me, and should produce writing that’s easy to read and intelligible. If you want something more detailed, have a look at the many respected style guides online such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and Oxford (which I think is the one that’s accessible and logical for most people). If you’ve already got used to a particular style guide from university, then of course feel free to stick to that. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 