Ferdinand—I mean the bull, not the king—spent a great deal of time sniffing corks, but when the time came to savor the bouquet, he was unable to rise above his haunches. Wishing to avoid drowning in his hoofsteps, I decided to throw caution out with the bathwater and nip the bull in the horns.
A tooth in the mouth is worth two on the hips—and many times its weight in gold wherever fillings are sold—but that's no reason to avoid Spain. A stampede by any other name is still a dash to the finish line, hooks and sinkers be damned. I believe the root of the phobia lies in the mean, square-jawed countenance of bulls, many of whom favor bullion as a hedge against inflation while rejecting its culinary properties. In a similar way, a tooth is still a tooth, even when its roots can no longer be relied upon to bolster self-esteem. After all, the healthful diet required for vim cannot be fully eaten without first entertaining the troops, even when doing so results in charges.
Unlike compound interest, treason carries its weight in much the same way a bull does, which is to say, above and slightly aft of the rail. But a gaggle of bulls is no mutiny, and late charges are better than a lifetime spent waiting for the other bull to jump the gun.
The time is now, and that's as true today as it was yesterday, tomorrow, and the day before that.
I think you're onto something here! Referring to your tagging of this post, I wouldn't call what you're doing "abusing the English language" so much as playing English at its own game. Words very often trigger or at least echo entire phrases, and if cliches lack originality then that's the fault of the writer. I look forward to more (un)like this piece.
ReplyDeleteYes, my hands are clean. I don't understand Parcheesi, so when I'm bored, playing with language keeps me from wandering out into the street in search of tar balls.
ReplyDeleteI'm not getting the vim part... can you explain please? Great messing with the language though. Your posts always cause me to think in an entertaining way.
ReplyDeleteHello Fyodor. There's an old (antiquated, actually) American expression about a person having "vim and vigor," which is ridiculous because both words mean the same thing. No one in his right mind would use "vim" in this way, if at all, which is why I sometimes do.
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping in!
Thanks for the elucidation. Sometimes I get your wordplay quickly and other times it darkly brushes by my understanding leaving me dazed and confounded.
ReplyDeleteEither way it's always interesting reading.
Keep it up!
Thank you, Fyodor. Having spent many confounding nights in a daze, I can only nod.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I've decided to add a new "toying with language" tag; the old "using and abusing the English language" tag to which Craig refers has been removed. In other words, he wasn't just imagining things. Well, not the tag anyway.
ReplyDeleteFor what it's worth, I've decided to remove the tags completely. At the end of the spin cycle, it doesn't matter what color the thread is, or how it was spun. A shirt is a shirt.
Delete