I Tried To Spice Up My Writing And Now I’ve Backed Myself Into A Corner
The perils of verbosity.
Everything was going fine. At least until I began to wonder whether “fine” was an interesting enough adjective to use in my very first sentence. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll go with smoothly instead.”
Great. Everything was going smoothly.
But as I continued typing, my fingers gliding across the smooth surface of my phone, I was stumped. I couldn’t think of a synonym to use… no, wait, I already said “use.” I couldn’t think of a synonym to employ for “smooth.” After a few moment’s thought, I mean a few moment’s cognition, I came up with “satiny.”
I was pleased with myself. Little did I know this was the beginning of the end.
Over the next few paragraphs, I began to run low on alternatives to the verbs and descriptors that I’d already utilized and was left with no choice but to turn to increasingly strange and archaic proxies.
The whole thing just snowballed from there.
Pretty soon, I found myself employing ever more idiosyncratic turns of phrase to evade repetition. At its inception, it was intoxicating. My discourse availed itself of a multiplicity of queer and ornate constructions. Each declaration steeped in daring and innovation. But as I delved deeper, striving to unearth hitherto un-utilized adjuncts, I lost the ability to palliate my loquaciousness.
Before I realized what was happening, my writing had devolved into an intractable web of labyrinthine formulations. The purport of each line grew indecipherably obscure.
What recourse for me now, dear reader? Am I doomed to write as if I were a seventy-year-old classics professor for the rest of my days? Won’t somebody elucidate the source of my inability to draw upon common parlance? Will these machinations be perceived as an artifice to suggest erudition? An attempt to affect an affinity with the belles-lettres? A gambit to necessitate that my readers retain a thesaurus in their environs at all times.
Not so. I am merely a hapless victim of my craft. My locutions have been stripped of any semblance of comprehensibility, yet I find myself powerless to resist the maelstrom.
As you can surmise, the situation is in dire need of rectification. I beseech that you dispatch assistance forthwith. That is if you remain able to comprehend me.
