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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Is there any significance to the lemons and the port in Ko Un's "Asking the Way"?
"Asking the Way" is a short poem by Ko Un, addressing "You fools who ask what god is" and telling them to ask about life instead, illustrating the principle with examples about ...
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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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Why does Bradbury use "had to" in "what they had to offer."?
An excerpt from "Just this Side of Byzantium" by Ray Bradbury:
I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to
offer.
Why does the ...
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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 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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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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What does "balks account" mean in Walt Whitman's "I Sing the Body Electric"?
Walt Whitman's poem "I Sing the Body Electric" is a sort of celebration of the human body. A phrase that recurs a few times is "balks account":
The love of the body of man or ...
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Does the line "writing in the time of covid-19" reference some work of literature? [closed]
Someone sent me this literature joke but I don't get it, can someone help me please?
He wrote:
*writing in the time of covid-19
Apparently the joke has something to do with literature, so if anyone ...
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Is a fish "Alive with breath" or "Alive without breath"?
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit contains many lovely riddles, posed in-universe by Gollum and Bilbo to each other. Most of them are original compositions by Tolkien himself, as he explained in one of ...
user5387
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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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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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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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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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Shakespeare's vasty deep: was "vasty" a recognised variant of "vast" at the time?
From Shakespeare's Henry IV Part 1, Act III Scene 1:
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
...
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Why "a creeper climbs" in Our Casuarina Tree by Toru Dutt?
In the poem "Our Casuarina Tree" by Toru Dutt, why has she written 'a creeper climbs...'?
Instead, she might have written 'a climber climbs'! Does it imply anything?
