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Quiet Man Cometh Quiet Man Cometh is offline
We're all mad here.
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Heh. Well let's see. "Phantom" and "imperil" are more matters of personal taste. "Phantom" in particular is hard to explain without going into the nuances of implications and such, but I suppose I could describe as the amount of "presence" the word has. "Phantom" to me feels more like an actual being that the masses would be reacting too, rathern than the mere impression or hint of one, which I think words like "ghost" or "shadow," "scent" etc would better fit. Personal impressions. Don't fuss too much though. Being a lit student I'm naturally hypersensitive to these things. ;).

"Imperil" is more straight forward. It just sounds more obviously pompus to me, something that could work easily enough with just "peril" and a connecting word to go with it. Again, personal taste. Feel free to ignore me.

On the fragments, I'm looking at them from the view of them being complete thoughts. "As they had never been hung before" strikes me as either a beginning or an ending to a thought, and that's what the trouble is. (Going language pick here) The sentence reads to be as possibley being the beginning of a thought with the word "as" being in front. 'As they had never been hung before, blah blah blah.' The same goes for the ending word 'Before' which in my view doesn't really have much of an air of finality to it, so it's sort of a soft ending, if that make sense. It feels ambiguous to me because of how it doesn't seem to be much of a thought to itself. If feels like it should be connected to something else and while it does work, I think, it was still something that didn't feel totally natural and I has to pause a moment after reading it to make sure it wasn't an error or there wasn't supposed to be something after it.

"If the world could but lay down it's arms" has the same issue. No real finality to the thought in my opinion. It could be the predecessor to another though as easily as it could be an ending, and probably easier in my opinoin. Think maybe of Boromir's phrase in the end of Fellowhip (movie), "If you would but lend me the ring." (I would use ellipses here because the thought feels unfinished, especially with his expression in the film ;)). That's what he says but if feels like there's more that has been left unsaid. The same goes for the fragment. "If the world could but lay down its arms..." [unsaid statement there].

Does that make some sense? The fragments and words here I mentioned because they made me pause during the reading or stuck out. Prose potholes, so to speak.

:).

How did you get green smiley man?
EDIT nevermind :D
Old Posted 06-13-2011, 08:58 PM Reply With Quote