Purple Prose 30 April 2010 9:47 pm
Hey, hey, hey! Long time no post, haha! Woah, school is really really crazy right now, so ALL HAIL LONG WEEKENDS (and the aptly named labour day)

So, I'm just gonna tell you some cool things that this external speaker talked to us about during my last english lecture (don't worry, it's funny!........heh)

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The Washington Post's Style Invitational has again asked readers to take any
word from the dictionary and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one
letter, to supply a new definition.

beelzebug: Satan in the form of a mosquito that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out

bozone: the substance surrounding stupid people, which stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future

cashtration: the act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

caterpallor: the color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you're eating

Dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly (extra info: the Doppler (i think it's spelt that way) Effect is what causes a train to sounds higher-pitched when it's nearer you, due to sound waves being closer or something)

giraffiti: vandalism spray-painted very, very high

hipatitis: terminal coolness

And my personal favourite,
sarchasm: the gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it

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The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which contestants are asked to
supply equally florid opening sentences to their own otherwise imaginary novels.

Inspired by the infamous opening line from the novel 'Paul Clifford' by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton: "It was a dark and stormy night". (immediately followed by "the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness") Yes, it was that bad.



"The bone-chilling scream split the warm summer night in two, the first half being before the scream when it was fairly balmy and calm and pleasant for those who hadn't heard the scream at all, but not calm or balmy or even very nice for those who did hear the scream, discounting the little period of time during the actual scream itself when your ears might have been hearing it but your brain wasn't reacting yet to let you know."
--Patricia E. Presutti, Lewiston, New York (1986 Winner)

"Professor Frobisher couldn't believe he had missed seeing it for so long--it was, after all, right there under his nose--but in all his years of research into the intricate and mysterious ways of the universe, he had never noticed that the freckles on his upper lip, just below and to the left of the nostril, partially hidden until now by a hairy mole he had just removed a week before, exactly matched the pattern of the stars in the Pleides, down to the angry red zit that had just popped up where he and his colleagues had only today discovered an exploding nova."
--Ray C. Gainey, Indianapolis, Indiana (1989 Winner)

"She wasn't really my type, a hard-looking but untalented reporter from the local cat box liner, but the first second that the third-rate representative of the fourth estate cracked open a new fifth of old Scotch, my sixth sense said seventh heaven was as close as an eighth note from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, so, nervous as a tenth grader drowning in eleventh-hour cramming for a physics exam, I swept her into my longing arms, and, humming "The Twelfth of Never," I got lucky on Friday the thirteenth."
--Wm. W. "Buddy" Ocheltree, Port Townsend, Washington (1993 Winner)

"The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life."
--Artie Kalemeris, Fairfax, Virginia (1997 Winner

"Through the gathering gloom of a late-October afternoon, along the greasy, cracked paving-stones slick from the sputum of the sky, Stanley Ruddlethorp wearily trudged up the hill from the cemetery where his wife, sister, brother, and three children were all buried, and forced open the door of his decaying house, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe that was soon to devastate his life."
--Dr. David Chuter, Kingston, Surrey, ENGLAND(1999 Winner)

And my personal favourite,
"Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee."
--Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI (2007 Winner)

For more, visit http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/lyttony.htm

Yeap, those were the most memorable parts of the lecture. Sorry if this post was too wordy! Here's a funny picture to lighten this lengthy post up.





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The writer is horrified of purple prose now