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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Why are all the schoolchildren referred to as guns in Clint Smith's "The Gun"?
Clint Smith's poem "The Gun" describes a school shooting from the perspective of a child. However, the central character, as well as its fellow classmates, are all referred to as "guns&...
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In Ozymandias, who is the "ye" in the line "Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" meant to be addressing?
Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias is a well-known and oft-referenced English-language poem from the early 19th century, and purports to quote — presumably in translation from Egyptian hieroglyphs — a ...
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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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Why does the Lady of Shalott stay instead of stray?
In Tennyson's poem "The Lady of Shalott" there is the following verse:
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colours gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
A curse is on her if she ...
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Where did the term Kwisatz Haderach in Dune originate?
I've always been curious how names and words are created in literature. Having finished the main Dune books last year, I was thinking how the term "Kwisatz Haderach" came about. Did Herbert make it up,...
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Symbolism of "hot gammon" in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land
I'm reading T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read for free online) and one particular line stuck out at me:
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they ...
user111
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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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Why is the king 'baffled' in "Hallelujah"?
At the end of the first verse of "Hallelujah"...
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
I take it the king is referring ...
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Did Philip Larkin use a swearword while quoting from Pym's Excellent Women?
In a letter to Barbara Pym dated 18 July 1971, Philip Larkin allegedly wrote:
I reread Excellent Women before coming away—what a marvellous set of characters it contains! Sometimes it's hard to ...
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What is the "heap of broken images" in The Waste Land?
In T. S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land (which you can read online), T. S. Eliot claims that someone (probably either humankind or the reader) only knows "a heap of broken images".
What are the roots ...
user111
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What does "kettle at the heel" mean in this Yeats poem, "The Tower"?
What shall I do with this absurdity —
O heart, O troubled heart — this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog's tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
...
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Why is a "cucumber sandwich" specifically used as what English faith has "only just enough teeth to get through"?
In Chapter 34 of The Kingdoms, Kite goes on this musing about religion:
The golden dome of the cathedral at Cadiz showed, just. He had been trying not to stare at it as much as he'd been trying not ...
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Why Pallas in "The Raven"?
In Poe's famous poem "The Raven", the eponymous bird, after tapping on the narrator's window, steps smartly inside and perches upon a bust of Pallas.
Why Pallas? As far as I know, this ...
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"Miss" as a form of address to a married teacher in Bethan Roberts' "My Policeman"
In Bethan Roberts' 2012 novel My Policeman, Marion Taylor begins working as a schoolteacher in 1957. She writes her name on the chalkboard for her students:
A moment passed as I gathered myself, then ...
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Language in A View from the Bridge
In page 33 of the play "A View from the Bridge" by Arthur Miller, Eddie describes Rodolfo saying he:
looked so sweet there, like an angel – you could kiss him he was so sweet
and
Paper Doll ...
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