Adding value, lustre, flavour to your English

IS THERE something called adding sheen, shine, patina, gleam, to one’s English? Yes there is. You can learn how to add communicative value, lustre, flavour to your English. And that is what separates the ‘boy’s from the men; in the spirit of gender sensitivity perhaps separating the ‘girls’ from women.

What separates A-grade students from B and C-grade students is not correctness of the English language but quite often the shine of it, the gleam or communicative flavour that accompanies the craftsmanship, the verbal intelligence. Even in public speaking and debating, the verbal polish often measures the taste and depth of thought. Simply being correct, in the context of placement of ‘is’ and ‘was,’ is not enough.

When a journalist writes ‘The slippery thief was a headache for the city police to apprehend,’ he or she does not literally mean ‘slippery’ as we know it. The word is being used idiomatically or figuratively to mean a bother, a pain, a nuisance, a problem, to arrest. I am tempted to say, ‘to bring to book” which is another idiom using the word ‘book’ to raise the level, the lustre, the shine, of my communicative intelligence and art here.

A figure of speech is a device used in speech or writing to make a description more interesting. Two very common figures of speech are the simile and the metaphor.

While some similes are indeed tired or overused clichés, properly chosen and used ones are very vivid and interesting.

Do not ever use the following similes no matter how much you may love them:

1. As happy as a lark / as big as an elephant/ as beautiful as a flower/ as fat as a pig/ as fast a frightened hare. These lack intelligent imagination and often weaken the communicative sense intended. For example you cannot describe an attractive or good-looking girl ‘as beautiful as a flower.’ Who looks like a flower? I have never seen a frightened hare and how fast it runs. My imagination of the whole scene or scenario is very remote and does not in any way help me to understand with accurate interest the intended sense. You need to be gifted with high powered imagination to create fresh, gripping, interesting and vivid similes. If you are not gifted, don’t just borrow similes and hope they will make your descriptions vivid.

2. Consider the following fresh similes: Are not they expressive and original?

(a) As free as a bird/like a charging rhino (buffalo, bull)/as angry as a wounded lion/drove like a maniac/as helpless (as sad) as a prisoner.

Enough of similes for one day! My advice is, ‘Please don’t use any unless you are really good at composing fresh ones that create vivid mental pictures.

In this week I want us to look at figures of speech and the polish or shine they bring into our English.

1. When her father died, her uncle, Mr Gilbert Maguguze, became the fountain of hope. (The word ‘fountain’ is used in a figurative manner)

2. When the husband dug into the case, he discovered more interesting but sad evidence of his wife’s unfaithfulness. (The word ‘dug’ is used in a figurative manner.)

3. His mind suddenly raced back to his early school days. (The word ‘raced’ is used figuratively)

4.He rocketed to the top of the class in a short space of time. (The word ‘rocketed’ is used in a figurative manner.)

ACTIVITY 1

Discuss the impact or effectiveness of each word of the four words used figuratively above. In each case, what else could the writer or speaker have said without being figurative?

ACTIVITY 2.

Find the metaphors in the following sentences below:

5. The headmaster has allowed the school to become a theatre of war and that has badly lowered teaching and learning standards.

6. The freed prisoner decided to turn over a new leaf and start on a new slate.

7. The poor man is under his wife’s thumb.

8. The teacher was dismissed because he spent all his time twiddling his thumbs instead of working hard and properly. (Please, never say, ‘The teacher was fired...’ That is a terrible common Zimbabwean colloquialism (not formal language). ‘Firing someone’ is not an English figurative expression. It is not an English Language expression even.

9. He likes to have a finger in every pie. Once or twice he has burnt his fingers because of this foolish habit.

10. The bride was over the moon on her wedding day.

11. It is not a surprise that the man was not heartbroken over the separation with his wife of fifteen years.

12. We ended up losing trust in the business dealers because they kept on changing the goal posts.

13. Voters who sit on the fence are always harmful to political progress in any developing nation.

14. After the agreement, the parties wanted it all in black and white.

15. The WhatsApp message looks harmless but if you read between the lines you will see that it is quite damaging.

Please note that the metaphors in the above sentence add value, lustre, shine, gleam, flavour, to the language used. Without them the statements would be ‘tasteless’ (another word used in a figurative manner), literally dry and boring.

ACTIVITY 3

Try to replace the metaphors with literal everyday words or expressions and see what I mean.

We will do this again next week. You must learn a lot of these figurative words and expressions though you must be warned:

Do not flood your writing, your compositions, or speech with metaphorical expressions. They improve your level of expression, no doubt about that.

They add lustre to your English. They make you earn more marks, trust me. BUT DONT OVERDO IT! One beautiful rose is beautiful enough to decorate the whole desert.

Until next week!