Syllables of glee–
Of bobolink and bee—
Her diadem of brain
Where lavish joy is pain
Temerity of breath
Seek ecstasy in death—
The doom of dim and wise
Is dust of paradise—
Inward—fighting woe,
Circumference of know—
Her raiment reveal
Sumptuous little meal
by Richard W. Bray
It’s all about getting her to read the first sentence. And then the next. And the next. Until she finishes the copy and picks up the phone to place her order.
In The Adweek Copywriting Handbook, legendary adman Joseph Sugarman explains the art of creating print advertising which will motivate a person “to exchange his or her hard-earned money for a product or service” (5).
Sugarman describes how “the purpose of all the elements in an ad” is “to get you to read the copy” (31). The pictures, layout and headline must pull readers into the ad. Then the words take over.
The first sentence must “really grab and keep” the reader (32). In order to do this, Sugarman advises copywriters to “Keep it short, sweet and almost incomplete so that the reader has to read the next sentence” (32).
It had to happen.
It’s you against the computer.
It’s easy.
Each of the three brief opening sentences provided by Sugarman is designed to lure the unsuspecting reader down the “slippery slope” of words, ultimately leading him to commit an act of unnecessary consumption.
Once the potential customer has begun her descent, the copy must be compelling enough to “get momentum going and create that buying environment” (114).
A good salesman can decide which strategy to utilize by reading his customer’s face, but a copywriter uses mere words to generate the elements of a showroom inside the reader’s imagination. This process includes anticipating and assuaging all possible objections. Sugarman warns: “Give the readers any excuse not to buy and they won’t buy” (124).
And just like any other salesman, the copywriter’s most important task is to develop a personal relationship with the customer. Although a particular advertisement appears in a magazine that will be read by thousands of readers, it should address potential customers in the same manner one would use speaking to a friend.
It is essential that you write your copy as if you are writing to that single individual. Your copy should be very personal. From me to you. Period (91).
One way copywriters achieve this sense of intimacy is by using the personal pronouns, you, I and me, which “create the feel of a personal form of communication” (88). The word we, however, can make the seller seem large and impersonal. That’s why it’s best to refer to a company and its support staff in an endearing manner: “My team of great engineers is available to help you” (281).
Human beings are capable of making rational decisions, but decision-making is not a rational process. As poet Theodore Reothke shrewdly noted, “We think by feeling.” And any purchasing decision is fraught with feelings.
As Sugarman explains:
You buy a Mercedes automobile emotionally but you then justify the purchase logically with its technology, safety and resale value (138-9).
Is there such a thing as too much copy? Not according to Sugarman: “There really is no limit to how long copy should be if you get results” (83). However, space is always finite in newspaper or magazine advertisements. (But space is not restricted with internet ads, which creates many selling opportunities)
But as a general rule brevity is better, and “the goal in writing ad copy is to express the thoughts you want to convey in the most powerful way but with the fewest words” (102 ).
Like a poet, an effective copywriter needs to understand the emotional connotations of the words she chooses. Also like a poet, she must learn to “edit for rhythm,” in order to create copy that flows mellifluously (104).
Like how Sugarman got sales to rise twenty percent by changing a single word in a page of copy (70). Or how he sold a quarter of a million Walkie-Talkies by calling it a Pocket CB.
by Richard W. Bray
Some Thoughts on Lyrics on Several Occasions
Ira Gershwin, a City College dropout, was a great lover of words. The lyricist who is best-remembered for penning songs such as Embraceable You, I got Rhythm, and Someone to Watch Over Me with his prodigiously talented younger brother George displays much wit and erudition in Lyrics on Several Occasions (1959), which is part memoir, part songbook (minus the music), part dissertation on his craft, and part meditation on language.
Gershwin discusses various philological topics which range in complexity from the correct pronunciation of the word “Caribbean” and the use of “like” as a conjunction (77), to Sidney Lanier on the “laws governing music and verse” (301) and “erudite Isaac D’Isreali (father of brilliant ‘Dizzy’)” on the origins of rhyme (321-322).
Gershwin demonstrates his impressive breadth of knowledge in both poetry and linguistics describing how he makes what might seem to be a rather mundane word choice:
In “Crush on You” I used “sweetie pie,” which I felt wasn’t too diabetic a term. And I have gone for “sweet” as a noun of endearment several times. But the parent of the last two, “sweetheart” (which goes back about eight centuries to “swete heorte”), I have somehow always given a wide berth (95).
Other times Gershwin’s explanations for his word choices are more prosaic. Here is how he came up with a particular rhyme in the preamble for Looking for a Boy (‘Bout five foot six or seven):
…about the only rhymes I could use for “Heaven” were “seven” and “eleven”; hence her preoccupation with height. (“Devon” was geographically out-of-bounds; Laborite E. Bevins was probably already married; and what could one do with “replevin”?) (9).
Words enter a writer’s brain from various directions, and then via some mysterious alchemy, words come out. I will offer an example from my own writing simply because I’m the writer I know the best (and I’m not presuming in any way that anything I have written is on a par with Mr. Gershwin’s work.) When I read the complete works of Wilfred Owen a few years back I thought, “Wow, this slant rhyme is pretty cool!” I naturally assumed that after a brief interval my brain would begin to sprout forth slanty rhymes. Still waiting.
And when the words do come, sometimes a writer has to drop everything and tend to inspiration which might not return:
Working incommunicado, trying to solve the riddle of a lyric for a tune, I sometimes didn’t get to bed until after sunrise. Even then the tune could be so persistent that it could keep running on through sleep, and was still with me at breakfast. And later in the day when I was about to tackle some other problem, it was capable of capricious intrusion with the threat of “Write me up! Work on me now or you’ll never get through!” However, after some years of tussling with any number of tunes, I found that the newer ones gradually became less tenacious and more tractable (136).
When I was on jury service in New York many years ago there was a case found for the defendant. Afterwards, in the corridor, I saw the lawyer for the plaintiff approaching and thought I was going to be lectured. But no. Greetings over, all he wanted to know was whether the words or the music came first (41).
And on how Gershwin made use of the phrase Nice work if you can get it, which he came across in a book of cartoons rejected by British humor magazines:
One, submitted to Punch, I think, was–I’m pretty sure–by George Belcher, whose crayon specialized in delineating London’s lowly. In this one, two char-women are discussing the daughter of a third, and the first says she’s heard that the disscussee ‘as become a ‘ore. Whereat the second observes it’s nice work if you can get it (97).
In comparison to today’s popular music, it’s hard to imagine people who would find Ira Gershwin’s lyrics offensive, although “Stairway to Paradise” pokes fun at people who are too pious for dancing and “Fascinating Rhythm” is obviously about a couple whose amorous activity is too loud for the neighbors. In Gershwin’s time, however, one musicologist referred to Gershwin Brothers hit Do, Do, Do as “smart smut,” (261) and in Philadelphia “one of the town’s top critics” objected to an “obscene phrase” in the song “‘Swonderful”:
I don’t know what he would think about these Freedom-of-Four-Letter-Speech days, but at the time he felt that “feeling amorous” was something better scrawled in chalk than sung from a stage (253).
In the Winter, 1955 edition of ETC., noted semanticist and future California United States Senator S.I. Hayakawa proffered the absurd notion that Ira Gershwin and his colleagues were causing an epidemic of helplessly lovelorn youth. He labeled the phenomenon it “IFD disease (Idealization; Frustration; Demoralization).” Mr. Gershwin’s hilarious response is on page 113.
Ira Gershwin continued to work with several composers for decades after his brother’s unfortunate and untimely passing. He wrote The Man that Got Away with Harold Arlen, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1954. This portion of the haunting song contains two classic two-syllable Ira Gershwin rhymes.
The man that won you
Has gone off and undone you
That great beginning
Has seen the final inning.
Don’t know what happened. It’s all a crazy game!
by Richard W. Bray
Coincidence is NOT irony
As George Carlin and others have pointed out, sportscasters, particularly baseball announcers, have an irony problem. Many of them simply don’t understand what the word means. Usually they mistake coincidence for situational irony. For example, an announcer might say,
“It’s ironic that Stubby McGillicutty broke the single season RBI record in Anaheim where Angel great Jackie Fullcup, whose record McGillicutty broke, spent his entire career.”
No. IT’S COINCIDENTAL.
The Three Types of Irony
1) Verbal Irony—Saying what you DON’T mean
Definition: A speaker means something different than, often the opposite of, what she says.
Examples:
“I can’t wait to start writing these forty-seven reports.”
“My walk home was only twenty-three blocks.”
(Note: The terms sarcasm and irony are often used interchangeably, but there is a semantic difference. Sarcasm is meant to insult or cause harm. So strictly speaking, “Great, I forgot my umbrella” is ironic, whereas “You call this a cup of coffee?” is sarcastic.)
2) Situational Irony—The gods are laughing at me by giving me ten thousand spoons when I just need a knife.*
Definition: When the outcome of actions or events is different than the desired or expected result
Examples:
If Dave died because he was allergic to the antibiotics that were supposed to save him, he is not merely a victim of bad luck. There is an oddly perverse poetry in Dave’s plight. Such a phenomenon as situational irony would only occur to a species which has a concept of fairness and a tendency to automatically anthropomorphize Fate.
The Psychic Friends Network went bankrupt due to “unforeseen circumstances.”
(George Carlin’s marvelous book Brain Droppings has some wonderful examples of situational irony, particularly the one about the Kurd who survives a brutal attack by Saddam Hussein at the end of the First Gulf War and escapes over the mountains only to be crushed by an airdropped box of humanitarian aid. If you want to teach Carlin on situational irony, however, be prepared to explain about the Kurds and the first Gulf War and to tell them who Darryl Stingley was.)
3) Dramatic Irony—The reader or audience knows something fictional characters don’t
Definition: When we say something is ironic we almost never mean dramatic irony. Dramatic irony occurs when the reader or audience has important knowledge which is withheld from a character or characters in a story, a movie, or a play.
The most obvious example of this is when the young lady in the slasher flick doesn’t realize that the guy in the hockey mask with the meat cleaver is hiding behind the hot tub—but we do.
Perhaps a more erudite example would be that the audience knows who Oedipus Rex’s parents really are.
* From the song Ironic by Alanis Morissette which can be a good teaching tool because it contains some hits and several misses. (Rain on your wedding day is simply a case of bad luck unless you are having an outdoor wedding in Southern California in June and all your bridesmaids are wearing paper dresses.) The song has been much-derided by English teachers because it contains one example of verbal irony, four examples of situational irony, six examples of bad luck, two examples of stupidity and one example of coincidence.
Evaluation
State whether the following are examples of verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony or not ironic in any way.
1. “Oh, great! It’s raining and I forgot my umbrella.”
2. I failed the test because I did not study.
3. Dave’s blood pressure medication gave him a heart attack.
4. Batman doesn’t know that the Joker is waiting for him, but the audience does.
5. Cal Poly Pomona and Cal Poly SLO are both located in California.
6. The box of airdropped humanitarian aid landed on the refugee and killed him.
7. I missed the job interview because I overslept.
8. “Thank you for this ticket, Officer. You just made my day.”
9. Three celebrities died in three separate plane crashes yesterday.
10. “I heard that sun block causes cancer.”
An Amusing Teacher Story (which is in no way ironic)
I made a class of college freshman read Welcome to the Monkey House, a collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. At the end of the quarter we watched some videos of stories from the book which were introduced by the author. Before class a student came up to me and asked how the man in the video could be Vonnegut when it says on the book jacket that he is “our finest black-humorist.” I explained that there are people who practice dark humor and there are also African-American humorists.
Richard W. Bray
Archibald MacLeish
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH
The poem’s meaning is evoked by the structure of words-as-sounds rather than by the structure of words-as-meanings. And the enhanced meaning, which we feel in any true poems, is a product, therefore, of the structure of the sounds.
–Poetry and Experience by Archibald MacLeish (23)
Scansion records units of rhythm, not units of sense
–All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele (530)
Vocabulary
Meter: The basic rhythmic structure of written and uttered words (not simply poetry)
Iamb: A unit of language consisting of an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable, in that order.
I once began a lesson on meter to a group of eighth-graders by exaggerating (both verbally and bodily) the inherent iambic rhythms of the following lines of poetry:
“I cannot go to school today,”
Said little Pegg-y Ann McKay
I have the measles and the mumps
A gash, a rash and purple bumps*
A girl in the class looked at me in utter recognition and blurted out,
“I get it:
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH”
I was happy that this student immediately picked up on the main point of my lesson, but I was really thrilled because her description of iambic poetry was, in my opinion, superior to the one that is commonly offered in textbooks, a depiction with a musical correlation which mimics a snare drum:
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum
ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum ti-tum
Here are some examples of iambic meter:
Iambic Monometer–One Beat (nuh-NUH)
Upon His Departure Hence by Robert Herrick
Thus I
Passe by
And die:
As one,
Unknown,
And gone:
I’m made
A shade,
And laid
I’th’grave:
There have
My cave.
Where tell
I dwell,
Farewell.
Iambic Dimeter–Two Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)
The Robin by Thomas Hardy
When up aloft
I fly and fly,
I see in pools
The shining sky
Iambic Trimeter–Three Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)
Touring a Past by Dick Davis
There is no boat to cross
From that ill-favored shore
To where the clashing reeds
Complete the works of war
Together with the grass,
And nesting birds, and weeds.
Iambic Tetrameter–Four Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH)
Now I lay me Down to Sleep
If I should die before I wake
I pray the Lord my soul to take
Iambic Pentameter–Five Beats (nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH,
nuh-NUH, nuh-NUH)
Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born a-gain
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
One Final Thought
…”scanning” a line is not a dramatic, or poetic reading of a line. Scanning a line is reading it in a special, more or less forced, way, to bring out the meter and any definite derivations or substitutions. Scanning will not bring out the other parts of the tension; it will tend to iron them out. On the other hand, a good dramatic, or poetic, reading will tend to bring out the tensions–but note well that in order to do this it must be careful not to override and completely kill the meter. When that is done, the tensions vanish. (Another reason why the meter must be observed is, of course, that if a line is truly metrical, a reading which actually destroys the meter can only be an incorrect reading–by dictionary and rhetorical standards.) A good dramatic reading is a much more delicate, difficult, and rewarding than a mere scanning. Yet the scanning has its justification, its use. We would argue that a good dramatic reading is possible only by a person who can also perform a scansion.
The Concept of Meter by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley
from The Structure of Verse, Edited by Harvey Gross (163-164)
Suggested Further Reading:
The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within by Stephen Fry
The Sounds of Poetry: A Brief Guide by Robert Pinsky
Versification: A Short Introduction by James McAuley
by Richard W. Bray
* Sick by Shel Silverstein
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, I simply can’t pronounce it
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, it’s my duty to renounce it
Rough and tough rhyme with stuff
So why does cough rhyme with off?
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, there’s no rule of explanation
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, it’s just a spelling complication
I ought, I thought, never get caught
Saying bout when I mean bought
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, my English teacher doesn’t care
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, nobody warns: Speller beware!
If I threw my shoe at you
Would it be true that we are through?
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, the cranial overload
Owe-Ewe-Gee-Aitch, might just make my brain explode
Though I reach out and grow like a bough
I’ll flunk my spelling test anyhow
by Richard W. Bray
Lewis Carroll
(A brief comment on parts of speech)
Individual words are not parts of speech. Instead, words are forms which act as parts of speech. But you don’t have to take my word for it.
According to Otto Jespersen, from the book The Philosophy of Grammar (1924):
Take the form round: this is a substantive in “a round of a ladder,” “he took his daily round,” an adjective in “a round table,” a verb in “he failed to round the lamp-post,” an adverb in “come round to-morrow,” and a preposition in “he walked round the house.” While similarly may be a substantive (he stayed here for a while), a verb (to while away time), and a conjunction (while he was away)….On the other hand, we have a great many words which can belong to one word-class only; admiration, society, life can only be substantives, polite only an adjective, was, comprehend only verbs, at only a preposition. (61)
A Lesson on Parts of Speech
Materials:
White board and markers or Smartboard with Microsoft Word
Academic Area – Parts of Speech
This is a unit designed to enable students to identify four major parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs.
Goals and Objectives:
Identify nouns, adjectives, and action verbs adverbs in context
Instructor will: Implement a variety of whole class small groups and paired activities in order to instantiate the concept of parts of speech.
Students will: Generate lists of the four parts of speech covered as a whole class activity and in small groups.
Lesson 1–Nouns
a) Teacher will ask if anyone can define the word “noun” (Answer: person, place, thing, or idea)
b) Write “noun test” on the board:
The noun test is simply putting an article or a personal pronoun in front of a word
Example: My ____________.
The ____________.
A ______________
c) Students will generate a list of nouns which I write on the board.
d) Students will “pair and share” to create a longer list of nouns.
Lesson 2–Adjectives
a) The teacher reviews nouns, using the “noun test” and ask students to give examples of nouns which he writes on the board, (Noun test: words that follow articles or possessive pronouns.)
b) Teacher will provide the definition of adjective, “a word that modifies a noun” Ask if anyone knows what modifies means. Explain how people sometimes modify their cars.
c) Using the list of nouns generated by the students, the teacher will have students give examples of words which would modify the meaning of these nouns.
d) Teacher will introduce the “adjective test”: My ____________house is ___________
or my __________________sister is _________. (it works with any noun)
e) Select five students to fill in the blank. For example, “My blue house is clean” Or, “My young sister is smart.”
f) Pair and Share: Give students five minutes to generate lists of adjectives individually and then share the lists with their seatmates.
Lesson 3–Verbs
a) Ask students to define both types of verbs (answer: state of being verbs and action verbs)
b) This lesson will focus on action verbs. Demonstrate the Verb Test:
Yesterday I _____________ed
Let’s ____________________
Tomorrow, I will ________________
c) Direct students to generate lists of action verbs in groups of four (at their tables)
d) Review lists with entire class.
Lesson 4–Adverbs
a) Review action verb definition from lesson three.
b) Explain that adverbs “modify” verbs. (Review the word modify from lesson two)
c) Write the “adverb test” on the board:
I ran __________________
Debbie ate _____________
Buffy talks ______________
(Teacher should sure to explain that adverbs do not always have to follow the verb directly and that they are not always “-ly” words. Also note how a part of speech depends upon context. For example, in the sentence “I ran home,” “home” is an adverb, although one would usually use it as a noun. Or, in the sentence “I ran fast,” fast is an adverb, but in the sentence “Hector is a fast runner” it would be an adjective. Also inform students that this is a working definition of adverbs because adverbs can also modify adjectives and other adverbs)
Evaluation (After also teaching prepositions, interjections, conjunctions, and onomatopoeia.)
1. Distribute copies of the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll to the entire class.
2. Have students take turns reading the poem aloud, one line at a time.
3. Play a version of the poem from Youtube or Librivox.
4. Group students and allow ten minutes for them to determine the parts of speech of the nonsense words.
Example:
“Twas Brillig (adj) and the slithy (adj) toves (noun)
Did gyre and gimble (verb) in the wabe (noun):
5. Review as a teacher-directed, whole-class activity.
by Richard W. Bray
Ernest Hemingway
Mailbag
My old friend Jackie offers this addition to the post Island of the Abused and Misused Words
Enormity. It does not mean enormous or gigantic or overwhelming. It
means monstrously bad. No one seems to use it in the sense of it being a BAD thing.
Here’s an interesting discussion of it:
(Keep those emails coming, folks: laughterhopesockeye@yahoo.com)
A Beautiful Paragraph
From Counterfeiting Conservatism by Patrick J. Deneen in the
April 1 edition of The American Conservative
Conservatism thus came to embody the opposite of Kirk’s conservative principles: custom became economic monoculture (i.e., globalization); variety became nationalism; prudence became Kantian jurisprudence; imperfectibility became a religion of secular redemption; community became mobility; and restraint of power became lust for power, particularly control of the national agenda. It lost its moorings by tracking its opponent, and with every victory only fueled the further evisceration of the folkways, traditions, and commitments that an originally conservative disposition arose politically to defend.
Addendum
Addendum to Writers on Writing from Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Always stop while you are going good and don’t think about it or worry about it until you start to write the next day. That way your subconscious will work on it all the time. But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.(42)
by Richard W. Bray
Alan Sokal
Misused Words–Dastardly, Dilemma, Prodigal, Abominable
Dastardly (it means cowardly, not detestable)
I think we all know who the culprit is on this one: Daffy Duck has been alternating this term of disparagement with the word despicable for phonetic effect for years, confusing generations of American youngsters.
Dilemma (it means a situation requiring a decision between two equally undesirable alternatives, not merely a situation requiring a painful resolution)
As with so many other ills that afflict our society, I blame Dr. Laura for this one. The McTherapy Maven and her callers abuse this word on a daily basis.
Prodigal (it means profligate, not reckless or rebellious)
We tend to think of the biblical Prodigal Son in terms of his wayward foolishness rather than his extravagance, which is probably why the word is often incorrectly used to describe a rogue rather than a spendthrift.
Abominable (it means loathsome or disagreeable, not monstrous)
We can trace this common linguistic blunder to an unlikely perpetrator, the avuncular actor and folksinger Burl Ives. That’s right, his masterful annual narration of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer conditioned millions of Americans to forever link the words abominable and snowman.
Abused Words–Heuristic, Ontological, Semiotic
Thanks to the heroic efforts of Alan Sokal, Katha Pollitt, Stephen Katz and other brave souls, the Emperor’s Clothes are now visible and the literary abomination know as postmodernism (or post-structuralism) is finally being driven from the halls of academia. But I’m afraid that the many casualties of this wretched interregnum include three undeserving victims: Heuristic (serving to point out, stimulating further investigation), Ontological (relating to the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such) and semiotic (pertaining to signs/symbols).
Sadly, these three fine words have been reduced to mere markers indicating oncoming highfalutin literary gibberish like this absurd sentence by Roy Bhaskar that Stephen Katz discovered:
Indeed dialectical critical realism may be seen under the aspect of Foucauldian strategic reversal—of the unholy trinity of Parmenidean/Platonic/Aristotelean provenance; of the Cartesian-Lockean-Humean-Kantian paradigm, of foundationalisms (in practice, fideisticfoundationalisms) and irrationalisms (in practice, capricious exercises of will-to-power or some other ideologically and/or psychosomatically buried source) new and old alike; of the primordial failing of western philosophy, ontological monovalence, and its close ally, the epistemic fallacywithin its ontic dual; of the analytic….
Katz humorously points out that, “The sentence contains 55 more words, but is harder to follow after this point.”
by Richard W. Bray
Emily Dickinson
Poetic License (Seger, Gershwin, Dylan and Dickinson)
So you’re a little bit older and a lot less bolder
Than you used to be
Bob Seger, Rock and Roll Never Forgets
Of course, it should read a lot less BOLD. But by assaulting our sense of grammar, the two-syllable rhyme sticks in our heads.
Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale,
Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale,
Fo he made his home in
Dat fish’s abDOUGHmen–
Oh Jonah, he lived in de whale.
Ira Gershwin, It Ain’t Necessarily So
By converting the word abdomen from a dactyl (three-syllable word, first syllable accented) to an amphibrach (three-syllable word, second syllable accented) and giving the second syllable a long “o” sound, Gershwin creates a clever, memorable and amusing two-syllable rhyme with the words home and in.
It ain’t no use in turning on your light babe
That light I never knowed
And it ain’t no use in turning on your light babe
I’m on the dark side of the road
Bob Dylan, Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
I’m pretty sure Bob Dylan knows that knowed isn’t a word you will find in a dictionary. But the choice is a beautiful abomination.
If I should die,
And you should live,
And time should gurgle on,
And morn should beam,
And noon should burn,
As it has usual done;
Emily Dickinson, If I should Die
I could talk all day about the choice of the word gurgle in line three, but usual in line six is equally compelling. Adjectives aren’t supposed to modify verbs, that’s an adverb’s job. (Of course, this is putting it rather crudely. A word is not a part of speech, a word acts as a part of speech, and usual usually acts as an adjective.) Curiously, the poem would not have suffered metrically if she had used the word usually because both usual and usually can be pronounced as trochees (two-syllable words with an accented first syllable.) Usually can be enunciated as a two-, three- or four-syllable word. However, using the word usual suggests that beaming is the sun’s quotidian task whereas usually would have implied that beaming was the sun’s normal condition. Great art is the result of such apparently minor distinctions.
by Richard W. Bray
Laughter hope sock in the eye's Blog 