Jaspistos
Zeugmatic
Oxymoron, personification, simile, hyperbole, archaism, periphrasis, solecism, paronomasia, alliteration, epizeuxis incorporated
In Competition No. 2463 you were invited to incorporate in a piece of plausible prose examples of the following terms: oxymoron, personification, simile, hyperbole, archaism, periphrasis, solecism, paronomasia, alliteration, epizeuxis. My apologies for having misspelt ‘paronomasia’ in setting the comp. At least it gave Mike Lunan the chance to launch a mocking epizeuxis combined with alliteration at me: ‘Paranomasia, paranomasia? You stupid son of a simpleton, it’s not spelt like that.’ Five of you misread the instructions and incorporated the terms themselves instead of examples of them, with very strange results. My favourite bad pun was Philippa Mellon’s ‘After all this deep art it was time to depart’ and the most intriguing oxymoron Miriam Pender’s ‘appetising sausage roll’. The prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each and the bonus fiver goes to D.A. Prince.
He knew the scribbling tribe would be concentrating on his every word, like cats listening for the stir of mice before a kill. Prithee, gentle souls, he thought as he ran the opening sentences across his mental autocue, do not condemn me for my brilliant dullness. He looked up to the high ceiling and down to the seats, pondering the enormity of the hall, and the seats, which had heard too many party conferences, looked patiently back. Soon millions of pairs of eyes would be sitting there, staring at him, hoping to catch him stammering, stumbling, stalling: stuck. He knew what they wanted — the date of his departure. Questions were in the air — and the heir was all too apparent. For a moment he toyed with a defiant No! No! No!, but then remembered an earlier prime minister had used that one, and look what happened to her.
As befits a Monday night, it was a mundane little event, but it’s still bugging me. On my way home I was accosted by a representative of the mendicant profession, an ugly, lowering fellow about ten feet tall. He grabbed my sleeve in a fist like a grappling hook and, bringing his fearsome, frowning face close to mine, growled, ‘Got the price of a cuppa, mate?’ A cuppa forsooth! The fellow stank of cheap brandy. Self-righteousness whispered into one ear, Compassion into the other. ‘You’ve worked hard for your meagre fortune,’ said one voice. ‘You can spare a couple of quid,’ said the other. I shook my arm free. ‘I never, never give money in the street,’ I said, ‘but I’ll buy you a sandwich.’
‘I never asked for no sandwich,’ the lout replied. ‘Be kind, squire.’ And I’m still kicking myself but I meekly handed over a hard-earned fiver.
Landscape gardeners to the gentry, plutocracy and celebrity.
Specialists in the well-designed wilderness.
Are you at heart a votary of Dame Nature? Do you love the liberality of her wayward hand? Fed up with Flora, and bored by borders but bewitched by bluebells, entranced by eupatorium? Let us cast our spell over your lovesome plot and, God wot, turn it into something very different, demi-Eden even if still situated in Dollis Hill, for your convenience.
Hurry, hurry, hurry! The seasons flutter by, like the butterflies you will enjoy when we have done our work. You will gasp at the transformation we can achieve, given a helping hand by the old Dame herself, her pump primed with the modest deposit payable on receiving your order.
‘Just look what you gone and done!’
The surgeon eyed the contours his skilful scalpel had sculpted. ‘Your skin is like satin,’ he smiled, soothing his impatient patient.
‘What you gone and done?’ she repeated. ‘’Sawful!’
‘My dear, the implants stand so proudly erect, they speak for themselves.’
‘’Sawful! One’s higher than t’other.’
‘Scarcely so....’
‘Miles higher! Higher, higher, higher!’
‘That hardly seems possible — although it may be the case that the one, when viewed from a certain angle, could be perceived as being, if anything, at a slightly — marginally, rather — lower level than its counterpart.’ He paused, then shrugged. ‘Howbeit, ’tis but, to my mind, a storm in a D-cup.’
Orbilius Pupillus, that fierce fierce disciplinarian who flogged Horace, believed that the infrequent use of an instrument of chastisement would have an adverse effect on a child’s character development. Where Goldsmith’s schoolmaster enjoyed adulation among the village swains for his erudition, Orbilius, sour-tempered as an old bear, was respected for being generously cruel. His famous blows made Rome groan, and shook her very foundations. Today’s social worker would view with horror his liking for a boy’s tanned skin, and would condemn the readiness with which his rod beat bare buttocks. ‘We’re here,’ she would probably say, ‘to look into all the things what’s been reported to us.’ Instead of having a statue erected to him, Orbilius would appear on the sex offenders’ register. O tempora, O mores!
Does the seed prevent the flower or does the flower precede the seed? In the case of the ubiquitously populated interloping taraxacum officinale or, in short, dandelions, who cares? I see them as the starlings of the flora screaming ‘Spring!’ and spilling lurid yellows like fried eggs across the lawn. Yes, ‘Spring! Spring! Spring!’ they scream, these wild, defiant children, thrusting their fat, forked fingers down through the soil to the centre of the earth. From there they suck the fire from its core and pump it up to plump green buds whose tight-clenched fists hide in the grass and wait for silent soundings from below to spread their shredded, garish petals in a rash of yellow fever on the grass. They all offend: none are different to the rest and each will spawn ten trillion seeds that crave to ride the slightest breeze by any route to root.