Sunday, November 28, 2010

BEHOLD!




Long-time logophiles know that curious words crop up to describe groupings of animals. An unkindness of ravens, a parliament of owls, so forth. And on the same day that a friend of mine was bemoaning the sheer number of metaphors she had to wade through, I came across this delightful Wondermark comic.

So I thinks to myself, what's the word for a whole bunch of metaphors crammed together? A commonwealth? A congress? A translucence? Then I had it. And after spending more than a little time that should have been spent sleeping and precisely NO time researching whether or not this had been done before, I had it. Collective nouns. For English.

You're welcome.
  • A mix of metaphors.
  • A likeness of similes.
  • A pause of commas (suggested by Andrew).
  • A stoppage of periods (also suggested by Andrew)
  • A tensor of parentheses.
  • A squadron of semicolons.
  • An ass-load of regular colons
  • An impertinence of innuendo.
  • A Constitution of articles.
  • An obviousness of foreshadowings.
  • A head of metonyms.
  • A confession of references.
  • A forest of symbols.
  • Anastrophe of vector a.
  • A ray of hyphens.
  • An aside of dramatic ironies.
  • A misinterpretation of regular ironies.
  • A happening of gerunds.
  • A perigrination of participles.
  • of in medias res.
  • A constellation of authors.
  • A recurrence of flashbacks.
  • A missive of quotations.
  • A spl-fucking-it of tmeses.
  • A skyscraper of isocolons.
  • A frustration of anticlimaxes.
  • A good relationship of climaxes.
  • A stormcloud of pathetic fallacies.
  • An implausibility of allegories.
  • An association of analogies.
  • A sponnybrook of doonerisms.
  • A tautology of tautologies.
  • A siege of ontologies.
  • An antibiotic of non sequiturs.
  • An inzameling of polyglots.
  • A reunion of cognates.
  • An ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE of hyperbole.
  • A stream of consciousness.
  • An asylum of grammarians.
  • An irrelevance of bloggers.

3 comments:

  1. It makes me sad that some of these are over my head (damned education, what good were you!) but the spoonybrook of doonerisms is my favorite.

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  2. By suggestion from Chris, I am hereby editing "An opulence of colons" to read "An assload of colons." Because that's the level of highbrow we strive for here.

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  3. I applaud you, sir. I applaud you.

    ReplyDelete