20140101.0900

It has been three years now since I have made a blog post on Hangover Day.  While I had thought to wax rhapsodic about past New Year's experiences, I realized as I attempted to write several that I would be ill-served by doing so.  There are enough such narratives about already, narratives better documented than any I might muster and doubtlessly far more entertaining that any I have yet experienced, holiday or otherwise.  I need not add to them; I will write otherwise, instead.

My beloved wife and I traveled to the City of Thunder once again yesterday, passing over the wind-swept plains in haste to return to the offices of our perinatologist.  Our child was weighed and measured, and found sufficient; the physician noted that all looks well with the life growing inside my wife.  It is a comfort to know that things appear to proceed as they ought to for the baby.

In the above paragraph, I once again use one of the kennings of which I am fond and which I recall having discussed recently.  The device, a poetic renaming of a thing based upon its qualities and cultural associations it has (so a form of metonymy, really), is one typical of Germanic poetries; Beowulf uses it abundantly, as do the Icelandic sagas, and I, as a student of such things, find that it creeps into my usage as well.  It is not a roach that I seek to eliminate it but despair of ever doing so, but a gem unlooked-for that enriches whoever picks it up.

Such devices do move away from the literal, I know.  They are bits of figurative language that require background knowledge and understanding to untangle, and so they are in some senses distractions from the thrust of what is being put across.  For that reason, they are disfavored in technical writing and reporting.  Yet they are a means through which features of culture are passed forward, and they are a means through which the use of language may be made beautiful.  They allow writers and readers to exceed themselves, engaging more fully in the dialogue that the best writing is and thereby entering into the greater communion of the world.

If, then, I write of the City of Thunder as it sits as the chosen seat of the chosen rulers of the wind-swept plains of sweet-smelling wheat, then I write in a place not only where I write but that acknowledges the NBA, theoretically-representative federated government, and Rogers and Hammerstein, and I am connected thereby to the communities that understand and engage with such things.  It is far more interesting than to simply state that my wife and I went to Oklahoma City, and this context of writing is one in which interest is rewarded.

Others look for the concision above other concerns, and there is nothing wrong with that.  I am capable of writing in such a way, which I know from having done a fair bit of it and having taught others to do so (unlike Shaw and unfortunately many others, I do not think that teaching allows me to not know what I am doing).  But this is not one of those circumstances.  This is more hortatory and epideictic, and if I am to praise a thing that demands skill in the writing and the reading, I ought to show that skill, myself.  Hence the several metonymies in the piece--and the many others that will follow after.