REELING AND WRITHING I: CALLING CARDS OF MY STYLE

Hello and welcome to Reeling and Writhing, this year's Dermarkian advent calendar to keep you busy throughout the month of December. In this space, we will cover style exercises, idioms, brainstorms, puns, just about anything lexical and/or literary, returning to the roots of this blog.


DAY ONE

CALLING CARDS OF MY STYLE
or,
HOW TO TELL WHETHER SANDRA WROTE THIS


There are things in my writing style that just scream SANDRA WROTE THIS.
KEEP AN EYE ON THE LOOKOUT IN THIS BLOG FOR THESE CALLING CARDS:

Autohyponymic words like "plant," "animal," "community," "finger," "shoe," et cetera...  are always used by me in the generic/general/including sense/at the superordinate level. This usage, which may seem strange to a native English speaker, is actually part of my own writing style. I adopted this usage since learning English in childhood from my parents, myself a born and raised Continental European just like them, and my mother tongue (Spanish), "grandmother tongue (French)," and "father tongue (Swedish)" do not feature autohyponymy (or the excluding usage of these lexical items). I think myself of autohyponymy (and of the excluding usage, for that matter) as nonsensical and ridiculous. It's me that finds the phenomenon strange.

I respect typographic conventions such as: "the LORD" in ALL CAPS in Scripture-quoting, accents and other diacritic signs in names and other cultural references (it's NOT "Engstrom", it's "Engström", for instance), typographic puns ("agüa" for sparkling water in a Spanish advert, "fi5e," "?uestion"...).

Profanity is (nearly) always minced in my works: "f*ck" is turned into into "foretruck" or "freak", "n***er" into "negro," "j***a(r)" in Swedish into "järnväg(ar)", et cetera. The only exception of a noun being Spanish "coño", which many adults in my environment have said. The only exception of a verb being French "foutre", for the same reasons. Religious expletives appeal to fictional deities: "Lord of Light!" being the most common one (but also "Seven hells/heavens!", although more rarely).

I always add pronunciation aids for lexical items hard or slightly dirty to pronounce: "Lieutenant" is pronounced "leftenant", "Uranus" is pronounced "You ran us", "Wriothesley" is pronounced "Risely", "Featherstonehaugh" is pronounced "Fanshaw", "Cholmondeley" is pronounced "Chumley", "Pepys" is pronounced "Peeps"...

Lexical items that catch my fancy will appear. Just to set them in stone and declare my passion for them:
"lock, stock, and barrel" (may be highlighted as "lock, stock, and freaking barrel")
"dead horse"
"a horse of a different colour"
"the god of tits and wine"
"at one fell swoop"
"good riddance"
"dead as a doornail"
"not even the Pope is infallible"
"boom shakalaka!"
"to wet one's whistle"
"to sear one's throat" (of strong/hot drink)
"to stagger"
"to reel"
"to writhe"
(hence the title!)
"to skip"
"to lilt"
"to quench"
"to quaff"
"to quell"
"ranker"
"ensign"
"lieutenant"
"epaulettes"
"bayonets"
"glistening"
"glittering"
"scabbard"
"eunuchorn" (a castrated unicorn, self-created lexical item)
"erudite"
"faux pas"
"gauche"
"aide-de-camp"
"femme fatale"
"ménage à trois"
"carpe diem"
"holdfast"
"lordling"
"kaiser"
"unlikely"
"unusual"
"mauve"
"scarlet"
"teal"
"magenta/fuchsia"
"Prussian blue"
"cobalt blue"
"coelacanth"
"holy cow!"
"limbic system"
"synapse/s"
"trachea"
"clitoris"
"vagina"
"indiscrete"
"poppycock/s"
"kirsch"
"pálinka"
"rakija"
"eau-de-vie"
"shipping"
"elated"
"belated"
"feverish"
"to throb"
"confession"
"rosary"
"inlaid with gilt flowers"
"to writhe like a trampled snake"
"to toss feverishly in one's bed"
"large and dreamy eyes"
"his/her face was strangely pale"
"to be still (of dead person)"
"his/her chest stabbed/shot with many red wounds"
"the blood gushed from his/her ears and nostrils"
"a red foam bubbled from his/her lips"
"strong drink is raging"
"to mercy kill"
"coup de grâce"
"august"
"to ravish the sensuous mind"
"Papal bull" (which is not a ruminant, but a document)
"whale-road (kenning for ocean)"
"to defenestrate/defenestration"
"snake in the grass"
"to curbstomp"
"hierarchy"
"MGF"
"free love"
"self-expression values"
"liquor"
"liquid"
"liquid fire"
"draught of liquid fire"
"twilight"
"evening"
"iocaine"
"strychnine"
"lockjaw"
"Friday"
the whole "Friday family": "Good Friday," "Black Friday", "Person Friday" (not a day, but a person: a trusted servant or second-in-command/right-hand person)...
"coitus interruptus"
"feminism"
"Mrs. Reverend" (a concept Catholics cannot grasp)
"ego"
"one's finest hour"
"blood, (toil,) sweat, and tears" (the "toil" is optional)
"never was so much owed by so many to so few"
"he was as pleased with her as she was with him"
"weary"
"ennui"
"foe"
"Chairperson" (or plain "Chair")
"stripling"
"upstart"
"parvenu"
"dashing"
"defiant"
"until the bitter end"
"freak"
"dire"
"ere"
"keep" (noun)
"harsh"
"shibboleth"
"rebuke"
"in cahoots"
"unbirthday/unbirthday party"
"usurper"
"usurp"
"usurp the throne of reason/the throne from which reason has fled"/"banished reason claims her usurped throne"
"draught"
"to quaff one's life in long draughts"
"elusive"
"roquelaure"
"threnody"
"thrid" (to run through)
"moon-eyed" (with either cataracted or large eyes)
"panegyric"
"passionate"
"sexagenarian," "septuagenarian," and so on (alternately "sixtyish"/"seventyish"/etc.)
"to flyte"
the whole lexicon in my brainstorm exercise:

"ere

quaff

rout (or, put to rout)

cahoots

writhe (like a trampled snake)

peruse

fens

partisan

roquelaure

asunder

dithyramb

enthrall

raconteur (raconteuse)

outré

maelstrom

trifle

platitude

ruse (ruse de guerre)

in sooth

ennui

usurp

pique

dirge

fête

accoutrements"

...