hello grammer, hello fodder

(6 comments)
2010.04.15
Hmm. Sometimes I wish I knew more about grammar -- like when Thurber was talking about Miss Groby's attempt to teach him metonymy and synecdoche...

One of the things I liked about the game "Braid" was the quaint and charming - if ever so slightly cornball - writing. This ending of this passage gets stuck in my head:
Tim needed to be non-manipulable. He needed a hope of transcendence. He needed, sometimes, to be immune to the Princess's caring touch.

Off in the distance, Tim saw a castle where the flags flutter even when the wind has expired, and the bread in the kitchen is always warm. A little bit of magic.
The thing was I was reading "Peterman Rides Again" -- a book by and about "the" J. Peterman -- and he gave this example of his catalog's oft-exalted copy:
The cotton we have used in our uncompromising replica of Gatsby's shirt is so luminous, in and of itself, that even a person who notices nothing will notice something.

Gatsby, of course, could afford stacks of these shirts; rooms of them. Never mind. All that matters is that you have one, just one. A piece of how things were.
I wonder if there's a name for the little trick these two clips share, of ending with a short, verbless fragment giving another name for what was just described.
One cannot change the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality.
Paul Valery

David Foster Wallace's word list
Thanks to a recalcitrant laptop I spilled a big cup of bitter Au Bon Pain iced coffee on the rug at work-I know what I'll be smelling today!
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/7/ - Jeez, Jell-O isn't "powdered bone slime"... it's *wiggly* powdered bone slime!

Weird- the concept of synecdoche has shown up in three different, unrelated areas for me today, hadn't thought about it for years...