JPEZ
A question for those with multiple language fluencies: how long before you regularly understood not only denotations but connotations?
This vintage advertisement is propped on my kitchen counter for one reason: I love its rising note of hysteria. You know that when the fairy reaches "floating," she will rip every single ringlet out by its roots.
"Floating" itself is a transitory and non-sustainable state, rife with apprehension. As a pratsplash waiting to happen, it also connotes the anticipatory derision of the onlooker. Here is a masterful use, from the London Review Blog:
"Right from the start of the MPs’ expenses – sorry, ‘allowances’ – scandal, I think we’ve all had personal favourites. The multiply-flipping Labour ministers may edge the contest in terms of the outrageousness of what they’ve done, but the Tories have had the upper hand in terms of vivid details. The wisteria was good, the manure was better, the moat-cleaning was better still, and then best of all was the £1645 floating island for Sir Peter Viggers’s duck pond. ... The model of duck house is called a ‘Stockholm’, apparently because it’s based on a building in Sweden. It’s five feet high. I don’t know why ducks like it or need it, I don’t know why it floats, I don’t know how they manage to make it cost £1645 but I do know that the the whole story just feels magically right."
HERR KEPLER'S NOTEBOOK
Time is the bully anchor of the opposing tug-rope team.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
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"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
The person with a happy home life tracks glitter through the world; the solitary person leaves snowprints.
-------------------------------------
"The grasshopper warbler's song comes up out of the earth just as you think the day is quietening down. It has no prelude or warm-up: it starts midperformance, as if switched on by the dark, as it if has been singing like this beneath the earth until it was dark enough to come to the surface. As if, though we hardly hear it, this singing never stops."
A Year on the Wing (Tim Dee)
All writing and cartoons on this site copyright 2008-2010 Julia Martin, unless otherwise credited.
:-)
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