#figureofspeech — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #figureofspeech, aggregated by home.social.
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It just occurred to me that the #English #FigureOfSpeech ‘You can’t have the cake and eat it too’ is silly. It should be ‘You can’t eat the cake and still have it’ or something like it.
I wanted to know if there’s a reason for the ‘reverted’ #idiom and looked up its origin. And, lo and behold, the Wikipedia says, ‘my’ version ‘used to be the most common form of the #expression until the 1930s–1940s, when it was overtaken by the have-eat variant.’
Huh. The more you know.
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It just occurred to me that the #English #FigureOfSpeech ‘You can’t have the cake and eat it too’ is silly. It should be ‘You can’t eat the cake and still have it’ or something like it.
I wanted to know if there’s a reason for the ‘reverted’ #idiom and looked up its origin. And, lo and behold, the Wikipedia says, ‘my’ version ‘used to be the most common form of the #expression until the 1930s–1940s, when it was overtaken by the have-eat variant.’
Huh. The more you know.
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“A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up”*…
From the 1964 textbook Examine Your EnglishRussell Samora has been fooling around with figures of speech; with his colleagues at The Pudding, he’s fielded a fascinating analysis of of that comparative workhorse, the simile…
Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”
I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives… I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had…
Samora explains how similes are structured and how they are used (and with what relative frequency) in literature. He examines some of the most common– and several special cases (“The Ironic Ones”). And he explains his methodology and sources… all in the context of a lovely interactive data visualization.
It’s as cool as hell: “Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise,” from @pudding.cool.
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As we agree with Steve Martin that “a day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.
A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.
But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) that led to some referring to him (all too poignantly) as “crazy as a bed bug”: he hated bugs (especially flies). Kirwan paid his servants a bounty for each one they killed.
#bugs #Cavendish #culture #dataVisualization #eccentricity #figureOfSpeech #history #infographics #language #Lavoisier #literature #phlogiston #Priestley #RichardKirwan #Science #simile #similes -
“A simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up”*…
From the 1964 textbook Examine Your EnglishRussell Samora has been fooling around with figures of speech; with his colleagues at The Pudding, he’s fielded a fascinating analysis of of that comparative workhorse, the simile…
Similes are all around us. But, if you haven’t considered this figure of speech since grade school, here’s a refresher: similes compare a shared quality of two things, often using “like” or “as.”
I pulled every simile in the form “as ___ as ___” from tens of thousands of fiction books for the top 500 most common adjectives… I thought it would be a trivial exercise, but the more I poked around, the more questions I had…
Samora explains how similes are structured and how they are used (and with what relative frequency) in literature. He examines some of the most common– and several special cases (“The Ironic Ones”). And he explains his methodology and sources… all in the context of a lovely interactive data visualization.
It’s as cool as hell: “Comparisons as Predictable as the Sunrise,” from @pudding.cool.
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As we agree with Steve Martin that “a day without sunshine is like, you know, night,” we might recall that it was on this date in 1789 that Richard Kirwan published his essay in support of the phlogiston theory (the belief, that dates to alchemical times, in the existence of a fire-like element (dubbed “phlogiston”) contained within combustible bodies and released during burning. Kirwan was among the last of its advocates.
A well-regarded scientist in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Kirwan met and corresponded with Black, Lavoisier, Priestley, and Cavendish. Indeed, while scientific history remembers him as a defender of an incorrect theory, his work probably spurred Priestley and Lavoisier, who respectively discovered and named the actual elemental agent of combustion, oxygen.
But Kirwan is also remembered for a personal eccentricity (one of many) that led to some referring to him (all too poignantly) as “crazy as a bed bug”: he hated bugs (especially flies). Kirwan paid his servants a bounty for each one they killed.
#bugs #Cavendish #culture #dataVisualization #eccentricity #figureOfSpeech #history #infographics #language #Lavoisier #literature #phlogiston #Priestley #RichardKirwan #Science #simile #similes -
"Hell is one of the most versatile nouns in the dataset. However, most of them have nothing to do with hell itself."
Russell Samora and Shelly Tan for The Pudding: https://pudding.cool/2026/05/similes/
#Longreads #Language #Words #Simile #FigureOfSpeech #Communication #Literature #Fiction
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"Hell is one of the most versatile nouns in the dataset. However, most of them have nothing to do with hell itself."
Russell Samora and Shelly Tan for The Pudding: https://pudding.cool/2026/05/similes/
#Longreads #Language #Words #Simile #FigureOfSpeech #Communication #Literature #Fiction
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"Sorry to hear that" is such a weird thing to say. It makes it sound like you're sorry someone inflicted a bad story on you rather than you commiserating with someone over something. #FigureOfSpeech #sayings #cliche
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"Sorry to hear that" is such a weird thing to say. It makes it sound like you're sorry someone inflicted a bad story on you rather than you commiserating with someone over something. #FigureOfSpeech #sayings #cliche