whimsy
Posted by Valerie Mc. on March 23, 1998 at 20:37:28:
In response to at the risk of sounding like a complete idiot., written by P. Bingham on March 22, 1998 at 03:05:39
.
] There is a book though (at the risk of sounding like I have my nose in a book 24 hours a day) that was originally published in the seventeenth century (I think) that was about language and sentence structure and the various ways that writers can influence the reader through writing techniques. For the life of me I can't recall the title but each structure (such as an idiom) was named after an animal. The book was filled with these beasts of the English language and very very fascinating. I find myself using these techniques all the time simply because I read this book.
That sounds a bit like later heraldry, where the herald changed the names of the colors according to the rank of the armiger. I think they assigned jewels to kings and planets to emperors - gules would be ruby or Mars, etc. (We're not the first generation with too much free time.)
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