Cartersville Area WritersCAW Term of the Week - Litotes
#CAW #CartersvilleAreaWriters #CAWTofW #CAWTermOfTheWeek #TermoftheWeek #TofW #WritingCommunity #Litotes
#CAW #CartersvilleAreaWriters #CAWTofW #CAWTermOfTheWeek #TermoftheWeek #TofW #WritingCommunity #Litotes
James McCollom
SleepyCattenAny other folks use and/or enjoy the English idiom fair-to-middling?
We like that it conveys the idea that something isn't good, but not entirely awful, whilst sounding rather pleasant.
e.g.,
Person 1: "How are you doing today?"
Person 2: "Eh, fair-to-middling."
Not sure if it technically counts as litotes, but it very much has the same feeling as litotic idioms like "not bad" or "could be worse".
Simultaneously, it sounds to our neurospicy mind like someone's paying the fare (transport cost) to travel to a quaint town called Middling 🤭
Indeed, the idiom is sometimes still misinterpreted as "fare to Midland".
We just think it's neat 🤭
#linguistics #YesWeKnowThatThisIsDorkyShutUp #idiom #FairToMiddling #litotes
In the DarkLitotes – Paul Muldoon
Though it wasn’t until 411 BC he took up the oarin the Peloponnesian War
against “man-loosening” Lysander,
our hero was not unknown
to Thucydides, who’d evenhandedly intone
“What’s sauce for Aegeus is sauce for the gander.”
Despite his background
being less than sound,
he nonetheless managed to drive a phaeton
through the Spartan ranks
or, on more than one occasion, an oar-bank.
If his circumstances were quite often straitened
he couldn’t say no
to manning up and having a go
at the slightest hint of an old school oligarchy.
No scanty there, then?
Faced with the very same problem time and again
he would resort to being snide or snarky
and immediately made a dent
in it. It was no small accomplishment
that he somehow managed to claim kin with Nestor
and, since he was far
from the sharpest ray in the earthstar,
was quite likely an ancestor
of the not exactly inspiring Greek
who would eke
out an existence in the precincts of the Abbey
where he’d been married sword in hand, ye Gads,
turning out to be not half bad
or, as Thucydides would have it, “None too shabby.”
by Paul Muldoon (b. 1951).
I recently discovered the poetry of Paul Muldoon who, as once described in the New York Times, “… takes some honest-to-God reading. He’s a riddler, enigmatic, distrustful of appearances, generous in allusion, doubtless a dab hand at crossword puzzles.” This poem is from Joy in Service on Rue Tagore (2024), which is published by Faber & Faber.
