She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,

The next speaker was a tall gloomy man, Sir SomethingSomebody. (P.)

We sat down at a table with two girls in yellow andthree men, each one   introduced to us as Mr. Mumble.(Sc.F.)

She's been in a bedroom with one of the youngItalians, Count Something. (I. Sh.)

Assignments for Self-Control

What is antonomasia? What meanings interact in its formation?

2. What types of antonomasia do you know? Give examplesof each.

3. Do you remember any speaking names from the booksyou have read?

4. Give examples of personages" names used as qualifyingcommon nouns.

Epithet is probably as well known to you as metaphor, because it is widely mentioned by the critics, scholars, teachers, and students discussing a literary work. Epithet expresses a characteristic of an object, both existing and imaginary. Its basic feature is its emotiveness and subjectivity:the characteristic attached to the object to qualify it is always chosen by the speaker himself. Our speech ontologi-cally being always emotionally coloured, it is possible to say that in epithet it is the emotive meaning of the word that is foregrounded to suppress the denotational meaning of the latter.

Epithet has remained over the centuries the most widely used SD, which is understandable - it offers ample opportunities of qualifying every object from the author's partial and subjective viewpoint, which is indispensable in creative prose, publicist style, and everyday speech. Through long and repeated use epithets become fixed. Many fixed epithets are closely connected with folklore and can be traced back to folk ballads (e.g. "true love", "merry Christmas", etc.).* A number of them have originated in euphemistic writing of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (e.g. "a valiant youth", "a trembling maiden", "dead silence", etc.). Those which were first found in Homer's poetry and have been repeated since, are known as Homeric epithets (e.g. "swift-footed Achilles", "rosy-fingered dawn").

The structure and semantics of epithets are extremely variable which is explained by their long and wide use. Semantically, there should be differentiated two main groups, the biggest of them being affective (or emotive proper). These epithets serve to convey the emotional evaluation of the object by the speaker. Most of the qualifying words found in the dictionary can be and are used as affective epithets (e.g. "gorgeous", "nasty", "magnificent", "atrocious", etc.).

The second group - figurative, or transferred, epithets-is formed of metaphors, metonymies and similes (which will

* Cf. with fixed epithets of Russian folklore — «краснадевица», «удалоймолодец», «чистополе», etc.

be discussed later) expressed by adjectives. E.g. "the smiling sun", "the frowning cloud", "the sleepless pillow", "the tobacco-stained smile", "a ghost-like face", "a dreamlike experience". Like metaphor, metonymy and simile, corresponding epithets are also based on similarity of characteristics of two objects in the first case, on nearness of the qualified objects in the second one, and on their comparison in the third.

In the overwhelming majority of examples epithet is expressed by adjectives or qualitative adverbs (e.g. "his triumphant look" = he looked triumphantly).* Nouns come next. They are used either as exclamatory sentences (You, ostrich!) or as postpositive attributes ("Alonzo the Clown", "Richard of the Lion Heart").

Epithets are used singly, in pairs, in chains, in two-step structures, and in inverted constructions, also as phrase-attri-butes. All previously given examples demonstrated single epithets. Pairs are represented by two epithets joined by a conjunction or asyndetically as in "wonderful and incomparable beauty" (O. W.) or "a tired old town". (H. L.) Chains (also called strings) of epithets present a group of homogeneous attributes varying in number from three up to sometimes twenty and even more. E.g. "You're a scolding, unjust, abusive, aggravating, bad old creature." (D.) From the last example it is evident that if a logical attribute (which in our case is the word "old") is included into the chain of epithets it begins to shine with their reflected light, i.e. the sub-jectivity of epithets irradiates onto the logical attribute and adapts it for expressive purposes, along with epithets proper.

Two-step epithets are so called because the process of qualifying seemingly passes two stages: the qualification of the object and the qualification of the qualification itself, as in "an unnaturally mild day" (Hut.), or "a pompously majestic female". (D.) As you see from the examples, two-step epithets have a fixed structure of Adv+ Adjmodel.

Phrase-epithets always produce an original impression. Cf.: "the sunshine-in-the-breakfast-roqm smell" (J. В.), or "a move-if-you-dare expression". (Gr.) Their originality proceeds from rare repetitions of the once coined phrase-epithet which, in its turn, is explained by the fact that into a phrase-epithet

* Don't fall into the trap of regarding all attributes as epithets. Such attributes as in "a round table", "a tall man" reflect objective features of entities and not their subjective qualification which is the leading characteristic of an epithet. Those adjectives (adverbs, nouns) which offer objective represen-tation of the features and qualities of an object form the group of logical attributes.

is turned a semantically self-sufficient word combination or even a whole sentence, which loses some of its independence and self-sufficiency, becoming a member of another sentence, and strives to return to normality. The forcible manner of this syntactical transformation is the main obstacle for repeated use of such phrasally-structured epithets.

A different linguistic mechanism is responsible for the emergence of one more structural type of epithets, namely, inverted epithets. They are based on the contradiction between the logical and the syntactical: logically defining becomes syntactically definedand vice versa. E.g. instead of "this devilish woman", where "devilish" is both logically and syntactically defining, and "woman", also both logically and syntactically defined, W. Thackeray says "this devil of a woman". Here "of a woman" is syntactically an attribute, i.e. the defining, and "devil" - the defined, while the logical relations between the two remain the same as in the previous example - "a woman" is defined by "the devil".

All inverted epithets are easily transformed into epithets of a more habitual structure where there is no logico-syntactical contradiction, Cf.: "the giant of a man" (a gigantic man); "the prude of a woman" (a prudish woman), etc. When meeting an inverted epithet do not mix it up with an ordinary of-phrase. Here the article with the second noun will help you in doubtful cases: "the toy of the girl" (the toy belonging to the girl); "the toy of a girl" (a small, toylike girl), or "the kitten of the woman" (the cat belong-ing to the woman); "the kitten of a woman" (a kittenlike woman).

Exercise VI. Discuss the structure and semantics of epithets in the following examples. Define the type and function of epithets:

1. He has that unmistakable tall lanky "rangy" loose-jointedgraceful closecropped formidably clean American look. (I. M.)

2. Across the ditch Doll was having an entirely differentreaction. With all his   heart and soul, furiously, jealously,vindictively, he was hoping Queen would not win. (J.)

3. During the past few weeks she had become mostsharply conscious of the smiling interest of Hauptwanger.His straight lithe body - his quick, aggressive manner – hisassertive, seeking eyes. (Dr.)

4. He's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-nosedpeacock. (D.)

5. The Fascisti, or extreme Nationalists, which means black-shirted, knife-carrying, club-swinging, quick-stepping, nineteen-

year-old-pot-shot patriots, have worn out their welcome in Italy. (H.)

6. Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? Therewas no up or down in a finite but expanding universe inwhich even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was ina state of progressive decay that would eventually destroythe earth too. (Js. H.)

7. She has taken to wearing heavy blue bulky shapelessquilted People's Volunteers trousers rather than the tighttremendous how-the-West-was-won trousers she formerly wore.(D. B.)

8. Harrison - a fine, muscular, sun-bronzed, gentle-eyed,patrician-nosed, steak-fed, Gilman-Schooled, soft-spoken, well-tailored aristocrat was an out-and-out leaflet-writing revolutionaryat the time. (Jn. B.)

9. In the cold, gray, street-washing, milk-delivering, shutters-coming-off-the-shops early morning, the midnight train fromParis arrived in Strasbourg. (H.)

10. Her painful shoes slipped off. (U.)

11. She was a faded white rabbit of a woman. (A. C.)

12. And she still has that look, that don't-you-touch-melook, that women who were beautiful carry with them to thegrave. (J. B.)

13. Ten-thirty is a dark hour in a town where respectabledoors are locked at nine. (T. C.)

14. He loved the afterswim salt-and-sunshine smell of herhair. (Jn. B.)

15. I was to secretly record, with the help of a powerfullong-range movie-camera lens, the walking-along-the-Battery-in-the-sunshine meeting between Ken and Jerry. (D.U.)

16. "Thief!" Pilon shouted. "Dirty pig of an untrue friend!"(J. St.)

17. She spent hausfrau afternoons hopping about in thesweatbox of her midget kitchen. (T. C.)

18. He acknowledged an early-afternoon customer with abe-with-you-in-a-minute nod. (D. U.)

19. He thoroughly disliked this never-far-from-tragic lookof a ham Shakespearian actor. (H.)

20. "What a picture!" cried the ladies. "Oh! The lambs!Oh, the sweets! Oh, the ducks! Oh, the pets!" (К. М.)

21. A branch, cracking under his weight sent through thetree a sad cruel thunder. (T. C.)

22. There was none of the Old-fashioned Five-Four-Three-Two-One-Zero business, so tough on the human nervoussystem. (A. Cl.)

23. His shrivelled head bobbed like a dried pod on hisfrail stick of a body. (J. G.)

24. The children were very brown and filthily dirty. (W. V.)

25. Liza Hamilton was a very different kettle of Irish.Her head wassmall and round and it held small and roundconvictions. (J. St.)

26. He sat with Daisy in his arms for a long silent time.(Sc.F.)

27. From the Splendide Hotel guests and servants werepouring in chattering bright streams. (R.Ch.)

Assignments for Self-Control

1. What lexical meaning is instrumental in the formationof epithets?

2. What semantic types of epithets dp you know?

3. What structural types of epithets do you know?

4. What parts of speech are predominantly used as epithetsand why?

5. When reading a book pay attention to the type anddistribution of epithets there. Give your considerations as towhat defines the quantity and the quality of epithets in aliterary work.

Hyperbole-astylistic device in which emphasis is achieved through deliberate exaggeration, - like epithet relies on the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. The feelings and emotions of the speaker are so ruffled that he resorts in his speech to intensifying the quantitative or the qualitative aspect of the mentioned object. E.g.: In his famous poem "To His Coy Mistress" Andrew Marvell writes about love: "My vegetable love should grow faster than empires."

Hyperbole is one of the most common expressive means of our everyday speech. When we describe our admiration or anger and say "I would gladly see this film a hundred times", or "I have told it to you a thousand times"-we use trite language hyperboles which, through long and repeated use, have lost their originality and remained signals of the speaker's roused emotions.

Hyperbole may be the final effect of another SD - metaphor, simile, irony, as we have in the cases "He has the tread of a rhinoceros" or "The man was like the Rock of Gibraltar".

Hyperbole can be expressed by all notional parts of speech. There are words though, which are used in this SD more often than others. They are such pronouns as "all", "every",

"everybody" and the like. Cf.: "Calpurnia was all angles and bones" (H. L.); also numerical nouns ("a million", "a thousand"), as was shown above, and adverbs of time ("ever", "never").

Outstanding Russian philologist A. Peshkovsky once stressed the importance of both communicants clearly perceiving that the exaggeration, used by one of them is intended as such and serves not to denote actual quality or quantity but signals the emotional background of the utterance. If this reciprocal understanding of the intentional nature of the overstatement is absent, hyperbole turns into a mere lie.

Hyperbole is aimed at exaggerating quantity or quality. When it is directed the opposite way, when the size, shape, dimensions, characteristic features of the object are not overrated, but intentionally underrated, we deal with under-statement. The mechanism of its creation and functioning is identical with that of hyperbole, and it does not signify the actual state of affairs in reality, but presents the latter through the emotionally coloured perception and rendering of the speaker. It is not the actual diminishing or growing of the object that is conveyed by a hyperbole or understatement. It is a transient subjective impression that finds its realization in these SDs. They differ only in the direction of the flow of roused emotions. English is well-known for its preference for understatement in everyday speech- "I am rather annoyed" instead of "I'm infuriated", "The wind is rather strong" instead of "There's a gale blowing outside" are typical of British polite speech, but are less characteristic of American English.

Some hyperboles and understatements (both used individually and as the final effect of some other SD) have become fixed, as we have in "Snow White", or "Liliput", or "Gargantua".*

Trite hyperboles and understatements, reflecting their use in everyday speech, in creative writing are observed mainly in dialogue, while the author's speech provides us with examples of original SDs, often rather extended or demanding a considerable fragment of the text to be fully understood.

Exercise VII. In the following examples concentrate on cases of hyperbole and understatement. Pay attention to their originality or stateness, to ether SDs promoting their effect, to exact words,containing the foregrounded emotive meaning:

1. I was scared to death when he entered the room. (S.)

2. The girls were dressed to kill. (J. Br.)

* Cf. withRussian— мальчик-с-пальчик, Дюймовочка, мужичок-с-ноготок.

3. Newspapers are the organs of individual men who havejockeyed themselves to be party leaders, in countries wherea new party is born every hour over a glass of beer in thenearest cafe. (J. R.)

4. I was violently sympathetic, as usual. (Jn. B.)

5. Four loudspeakers attached to the flagpole emitted ashattering roar of what Benjamin could hardly call music,as if it were played by a collection of brass bands, a fewhundred fire engines, a thousand blacksmiths' hammers andthe amplified reproduction of a force-twelve wind. (A. S.)

6. The car which picked me up on that particular guiltyevening was a Cadillac limousine about seventy-three blockslong. (J. B.)

7. Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. (Sc. F.)

8. He didn't appear like the same man; then he was allmilk and honey-now he was all starch and vinegar. (D.)

9. She was a giant of a woman. Her bulging figure wasencased in a green crepe dress and her feet overflowed inred shoes. She carried a mammoth red pocketbook thatbulged throughout as if it were stuffed with rocks. (Fl. O'C.)

10. She was very much upset by the catastrophe thathad befallen the Bishops, but it was exciting, and she wastickled to death to have someone fresh to whom she couldtell all about it. (S. M.)

11. Babbitt's preparations for leaving the office to its feeble self during the hour and a half of his lunch-period were somewhat less elaborate than the plans for a general European War. (S. M.)

12. The little woman, for she was of pocket size, crossedher hands solemnly on her middle. (G.)

13. We danced on the handkerchief-big space between thespeak-easy tables. (R. W.)

14. She wore a pink hat, the size of a button. (J. R.)

15. She was a sparrow of a woman. (Ph. L.)

16. And if either of us should lean toward the other, even a fraction of an inch, the balance would be upset. (O. W.)

17. He smiled back, breathing a memory of gin at me.(W. G.)

18. About a very small man in the Navy: This newsailor stood five feet nothing in sea boots. (Th. P.)

19. She busied herself in her midget kitchen. (T. C.)

20. The rain had thickened, fish could have swum throughthe air. (T. C.)

Assignments for Self-Control

1. What meaning is foregrounded in a hyperbole?

2. What types of hyperbole can you name?

3. What makes a hyperbole trite and where are tritehyperboles predominantly used?

4. What is understatement? In what way does it differfrom hyperbole?

5. Recollect cases of vivid original hyperboles or under-statements from your Russian or English reading.

Oxymoron is stylistic device the syntactic and semantic structures of which come to clashes. In Shakespearian defi-nitions of love, much quoted from his Romeo and Juliet, perfectly correct syntactically, attributive combinations present a strong semantic discrepancy between their members. Cf.: "O brawling love! Оloving hate! Оheavy lightness! Serious vanity! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!"

As is clearly seen from this string of oxymorons, each one of them is a combination of two semantically contradictory notions, that help to emphasize contradictory qualities as a dialectal unity simultaneously existing in the described phe-nomenon. As a rule, one of the two members of oxymoron illuminates the feature which is universally observed and acknowledged while the other one offers a purely subjective individual perception of the object. Thus in an oxymoron we also deal with the foregrounding of emotive meaning, only of a different type than the one observed in previously discussed SDs. The most widely known structure of oxymoron is attributive, so it is easy to believe that the subjective part of the oxymoron is embodied in the attribute-epithet, especially because the latter also proceeds from the foregrounding of the emotive meaning. But there are also others, in which verbs are employed. Such verbal structures as "to shout mutely" (I. Sh.) or "to cry silently" (M. W.) seem to strengthen the idea, which leads to the conclusion that oxymoron is a specific type of epithet. But the peculiarity of an oxymoron lies in the fact that the speaker's (writer's) subjective view can be expressed through either of the members of the word combination.

Originality and specificity of oxymoron becomes especially evident in non-attributive structures which also, not infrequently, are used to express semantic contradiction, as in "the street damaged by improvements" (О. Н.) or "silence was louder than thunder" (U.).

Oxymorons rarely become trite, for their components, linked forcibly, repulse each other and oppose repeated use. There are few colloquial oxymorons, all of them showing a high degree of the speaker's emotional involvement in the situation, as in "damn nice", "awfully pretty".*

Exercise VIII. In the following sentences pay attention to the structure and semantics of oxymorons. Also indicate which of their members conveys the individually viewed feature of the object and which one reflects its generally accepted characteristic:

1. He caught a ride home to the crowded loneliness of
the barracks. (J.)

2. Sprinting towards the elevator he felt amazed at his
own cowardly courage. (G. M.)

3. They were a bloody miserable lot - the miserablest lotof men I ever saw. But they were good to me. Bloodygood. (J. St.)

4. He behaved pretty lousily to Jan. (D. C.)

5. Well might he perceive the hanging of her hair in
fairest quantity in locks, some curled and some as if it
were forgotten, with such a careless care and an art so
hiding art that she seemed she would lay them for a
pattern. (Ph. S.)

6. There were some bookcases of superbly unreadable
books. (E. W.)

7. Absorbed as we were in the pleasures of travel – andI in my modest pride at being the only examinee to causea commotion - we were over the old Bridge. (W. G.)

8. "Heaven must be the hell of a place. Nothing but
repentant sinners up there, isn't it?" (Sh. D.)

9. Harriet turned back across the dim garden. The lightless
light looked down from the night sky. (I. M.)

10. Sara was a menace and a tonic, my best enemy;
Rozzie was a disease, my worst friend. (J. Car.)

11. It was an open secret that Ray had been ripping
his father-in-law off. (D. U.)

12. A neon sign reads "Welcome to Reno - the biggestlittle town in the world." (A. M.)

13. Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield are Good Bad Boys
of American literature. (V.)

14. Haven't we here the young middle-aged woman who

* Some often repeated Russian titles form a group of trite oxymorons as in «Живойтруп», «Живыемощи», «Песнябезслов», «Оптимистическаятрагедия».

cannot quite compete with the paid models in the fashion magazine but who yet catches our eye? (Jn. H.)

15. Their bitter-sweet union did not last long. (A. C.)

16. He was sure the whites could detect his adoring
hatred of them. (Wr.)

17. You have got two beautiful bad examples for parents.
(Sc. F.)

18. He opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked.
The garage was full of nothing. (R. Ch.)

19. She was a damned nice woman, too. (H.)

20. A very likeable young man with a pleasantly ugly
face. (A. C.)

Assignments for Self-Control

1. What is an oxymoron and what meanings are fore-
grounded in its formation?

2. Why are there comparatively few trite oxymorons and
where are they mainly used?

3. Give some examples of trite oxymorons.

After you have learnt individual lexical stylistic devices and the linguistic mechanism which operates in each of them, we may pass on to general stylistic analysis on the lexical level.* Your main task is to indicate how and through what lexical means additional logical, emotive, expressive informa-tion is created. In many cases you will see a number of lexical units used in convergence to still more enhance the expressiveness and emphasis of the utterance.

Exercise IX. Pay attention to the stylistic function of various lexical expressive means used individually and in convergence:

1. Constantinople is noisy, hot, hilly, dirty and beautiful.
It is packed with uniforms and rumors. (H.)

2. At Archie Schwert's party the fifteenth Marquess of
Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon,  Baron Brendon, Lord
of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the
Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn,
Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of
Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenon-
ceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, "Hullo," he said.
"Isn't it a repulsive party? What are you going to say

* Samples of the general stylistic analysis on the lexical level are given in Supplement 1 on p. 180.

about it?" for they were both of them as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers. (E. W.)

3. Across the street a bingo parlour was going full blast;
the voice of the hot dog merchant split the dusk like an
axe. The big blue blared down the street. (R. Ch.)

4. Lester was all alone. He listened to his steps, as if
they weren't his at all but somebody else's. How long can
a guy stand this without going nuts? Wattinger has been
a good boy but it got him and he was blown to smithereens;
they say they'd seen his arm sailing through the air; higher
and higher, an arm alone rising to meet God. He wondered
whether, up there, they'd accept an arm in place of the
whole man. His soul couldn't possibly have been in the
arm; it was in your heart or in your guts or in your
brain but not in your arm. (St. H.)

5. For me the work of Gertrude Stein consists in a
rebuilding, an entire   new recasting of life, in the city of
words. Here is one artist who has been able to accept
ridicule, to go live among the little housekeeping words,
the swaggering bullying street-corner words, the honest working,
money-saving words, and all the other forgotten and neglected
citizens of the sacred and half forgotten city. (Sh. A.)

6. Only a couple of the remaining fighters began to attack
the bombers. On they all came, slowly getting larger. The
tiny mosquitoes dipped and swirled and dived in a mad,
whirling dance around the heavier, stolid horseflies, who
nevertheless kept serenely and sedately on. (J.)

7. "I guess," said Mr. Hiram Fish sotto voce to himself
and the world at large, "that this has been a great little
old week." (Ch.)

8. The good ships Law and Equity, these teak-built, copper-
bottomed iron-fastened, brazen-faced, and not by any means
fast-sailing Clippers, are laid up in ordinary. (D.)

9. An enormous grand  piano grinned savagely at the
curtains as if it would grab them, given the chance. (W. Gl.)

10. Duffy was face to face with the margin of mistery
where all our calculations collapse, where the stream of time
dwindles into the sands of eternity, where the formula fails
in the test-tube, where chaos and old night hold sway and
we hear the laughter in the ether dream. (R. W.)

11. Mrs. Ape watched them benignly, then squaring her
shoulders and looking (except that she had really no beard
to speak of) every inch a sailor strode resolutely forrad to
the first-class bar. (E. W.)

12.                     The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on. (K. S.)

13. On that little pond the leaves floated in peace and
praised Heaven with their hues, the sunlight haunting over
them.(G.)

14. From the throats of the ragged black men, as they
trotted up and down the landing-stage, strange haunting notes.
Words were caught up, tossed about, held in the throat.
Word-lovers, sound-lovers - the blacks seemed to hold a tonein some warm place, under their red tongues perhaps. Theirthick lips were walls under which the tone hid. (Sh. A.)

15. It was a relief not to have to machete my way
through a jungle of what-are-you-talking-aboutery before I could
get at him. (J. A.)

16.      Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice,

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice. (R. Fr.)

17. Outside the narrow street fumed, the sidewalks swarmed
with fat stomachs. (J. R.)

18. The owner, now at the wheel, was the essence of
decent self-satisfaction;  a baldish, largish, level-eyed man,
rugged of neck but sleek and round of face - face like theback of a spoon bowl. (S. L.)

19. His fingertips seemed to caress the wheel as he
nursed it over the dark winding roads at a mere whispering
sixty. (L. Ch.)

20. We plunged in and out of sun and shadow-pools,
and joy, a glad-to-be-alive exhilaration, jolted through me like
a jigger of nitrogen. (T. C.)

21. They were both wearing hats like nothing on earth,
which bobbed and nodded as they spoke. (E. W.)

22. These jingling toys in his pocket were of eternal
importance like baseball or Republican Party. (S. L.)

23. He might almost have been some other man dreaming
recurrently that he was an electrical engineer. On the other

side of the edge, waiting forhim topeer into it late at night or whenever he was alone and the show of work had stopped, wasillimitable unpopulated darkness, a greenland night; and only his continuing heart beats kept him from disappearing into it. Moving along this edge, doing whatever the day demanded, or the night offered, grimly observant (for he was not without fortitude), he noticed much that has escaped him before. He found he was attending a comedy, a show that would have been very funny indeed if there had been life outside the theatre instead of darkness and dissolution. (P.)

24. Poetry deals with primal and conventional things-the
hunger for bread, the love of woman, the love of children,
the desire for immortal life. If men really had new sentiments,
poetry. could not deal with them. If, let us say, a man
did not feel a bitter craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany
tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of
falling in love with a woman,  fell in love with a fossil
or a sea anemone poetry could not express him. Poetry can
only express what is original in one sense-the sense in
which we speak of original sin. It is original not in the
paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being
old; it is original in the sense that it deals with origins.
(G. K. Ch.)

25. His dinner arrived, a plenteous platter of food – butno plate. He glanced at his neighbors. Evidently plates werean affectation frowned upon in the Oasis cafe.

Taking up a tarnished knife and fork, he pushed aside the underbrush of onions and came face to face with his steak.

First impressions are important, and Bob Eden knew at once that this was no meek, complacent opponent that confronted him. The steak looked back at him with, an air of defiance that was amply justified by what followed. After a few moments of unsuccessful battling, he summoned the sheik. "How about a steel knife?" inquired Bob.

"Only got three and they're all in use," the waiter replied.

Bob Eden resumed the battle, his elbows held close, his muscles swelling. With set teeth and grim face he bore down and cut deep. There was. a terrible screech as his knife skidded along the platter, and to his horror he saw the steak rise from its bed of gravy and onions and fly from him. It travelled the grimy counter for a second then dropped on to the knees of the girl and thence to the floor.

Eden turned to meet her blue eyes filled with laughter.

"Oh, I'm sorry," he said. "I thought it was a steak, and it seems to be a lap dog." (D. B.)

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