Today we belly up to the bar with our word friends one last time in this third and final column on tavern-hopping figures of speech. Drink in the humor and enjoy the clever way the unknown authors of this list have managed to make learning about our language a little more fun.
1. Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, “Get out — we don’t serve your type.”
2. A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
3. A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
4. Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
5. A synonym strolls into a tavern.
6. At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar — fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
7. A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
8. Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
9. A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
As with the past two columns, here’s a little explanation and context for any of the bar hopping antics above that you didn’t quite get or you’d like more explanation for. (Yes, I just ended that sentence in a a preposition; Merriam Webster announced it’s legal in February!)
1. When the barkeep told Papyrus and Comic Sans that he didn’t serve their type, he knew of what he spoke. While most people think “typeface” and “font” are the same things, they’re actually not. You see, fonts (which get their name from the Middle French word “fonte”) are actually stylistic variations of the letters that make up a specific typeface. The variations are generally in weight, size or style. For instance, if I write “typeface” in three different fonts it could look like this: typeface, typeface, typeface. All the same typeface, but different weight, size or style. The confusion seems to have started in the late 1980s, about the time Microsoft began calling typefaces “fonts” in its early version of its Word program.
2. A mixed metaphor is a combination of two or more incompatible metaphors that produces a ridiculous effect. Some fun examples: Too many cooks break the camel’s back. This is hardly rocket surgery. I’ll be here ’til the cows come home to roost. (Thank you masterclass.com.)
3. If you’ve ever used a comma to link two independent clauses, you’ve created a comma splice. Ideally, independent clauses should be linked by either a colon, a semicolon or a conjunction, but not a comma.
4. Verbs are so cool. And naturally, being humans, we give names to EVERYTHING, including separate names to verbs that do and don’t do things. Some verbs are transitive, some are intransitive, some are both. Stay with me. Take “drank” for instance in “The comma drank a cold brewski.” Because the comma did something (drank) to something (the cold beer), “drank” is a transitive verb here. But if the comma drank a beer slowly, because the verb (“drank”) didn’t do something to something else, it is an intransitive verb. Lost? Consider: “She yawned reading my last sentence.” Because you can’t yawn a sentence or yawn a cold beer, or yawn anything else for that matter, the word yawn is an intransitive verb. Yawn.
5. Synonyms are comparable words for the same thing. Rapid = fast = quick. And, as mentioned above, we’ve also given different names to different synonym-like words. Synecdoche and metonyms both come close to being synonyms for “synonym” because both are figures of speech that describe when a part of something is used to represent the entire thing. For instance, “Washington” is often used as a stand-in when someone’s referring to the federal government. But is there an actual synonym for synonym? If you ask lexicographer David Grambs, there is. In his 1997 book “The Endangered English Dictionary: Bodacious Words Your Dictionary Forgot,” Grambs asserts that the antiquated word “poecilonym” (PEE-si-lo-nim) is about as close as we’re going to get to an actual synonym for “synonym.”
6. We all know what a cliché is. It’s an overused phrase or opinion that, because you’ve gone and used it yet again, shows a lack of original thought. Ridding your writing of cliches should be easy, after all, if you read between the lines. They’re low-hanging fruit. Removing them might be an uphill battle, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.
7. Similar to the comma spice above, a run-on sentence happens when two independent clauses are put together without proper punctuation or appropriate conjunctions. I’m not ashamed to admit that more than a few times I have spent several minutes attempting to reword a long sentence so that it made sense before eventually coming to the realization that simply breaking the thing into two shorter sentences would work much better. Meanwhile, a sentence fragment is a sentence that’s missing either its main verb or its subject. The best way to avoid sentence fragments in your writing is to proofread, proofread, proofread. With an eye out for pesky fragments.
8. A Greek term meaning “diagonal arrangement,” chiasmus is a word that describes when one part of a phrase or sentence mirrors a preceding part. An excellent example of chiasmus comes from British World War II Prime Minister Winston Churchill, when he explained to his people after the first major victory for the Allies in the war: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
9. Since when does “literally” also mean “figuratively?” Probably since about 1925 when F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “The Great Gatsby.” In it, he wrote of its title character: “He literally glowed.” What happened is that “literally” is now often used informally to create emphasis, or as a form or exaggeration. Even the folks at Merriam-Webster concur with the common shift in the meaning of “literally,” offering up a pair of definitions for the word: “1) In a literal sense or manner : actually” and “2) in effect : virtually.” And that’s literally the truth.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.” He can be reached at jlwitherell19@gmail.com.
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