By the way, I much enjoyed your very nicely written "rant." Not sure why the Turducken is "overcooked," but the word does help the rhythm, so nevermind. "Congenial as cuddling a water moccasin" made my day.
On Wed, May 20, 2015 at 11:41 AM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:
>
> On Wed, May 20, 2015 10:11 am, Arthur Maisel wrote:
> > Michael Smith has a point. But that the trope was ready-to-hand doesn't
> > preclude its application to a situation in which some of those thus
> labled
> > literally were slaves. To ignore that the language preceded the situation
> > is anachronistic; to notice that it might have been evoked because of the
> > facts isn't.
>
>
> Getting at a writer's intent is always a tricky business. But as a general
> canon of method, I'd suggest that a conventional locution should
> ordinarily be taken in its conventional sense unless there's some clear
> reason, apart from the reader's desire, to take it in some more specific
> or pointed way.
>
> In this context it might be noted that Scott Key's lyric is almost
> stupefying bad, dull, tone-deaf, erratic in scansion, and so stuffed with
> cliche it resembles an overcooked Turducken. Conventional tropes were
> clearly the breath of life to this execrable provincial poetaster, for
> whom entertaining an original thought or using an original image would
> have been about as congenial as cuddling a water moccasin. One might
> suggest that he stands in the same relation to English Augustan verse as
> Marse Tom Jefferson does to English Palladianism.
>
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