Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach
Of ordinary men.
--
Stanza 14.William Wordsworth
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Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
George Orwell
The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life. 352
Blaise Pascal
Granted, in daily speech, where we don't stop to consider every word, we all use phrases like "the ordinary world," "ordinary life," "the ordinary course of events"... But in the language of poetry, where every word is weighed, nothing is usual or normal. Not a single stone and not a single cloud above it. Not a single day and not a single night after it. And above all, not a single existence, not anyone's existence in this world.
It looks like poets will always have their work cut out for them.Wislawa Szymborska
Were I so tall to reach the pole,
Or grasp the ocean with my span,
I must be measured by my soul;
The mind's the standard of the man.Isaac Watts
In the time of Pythagoras that proverbial phrase Ipse dixit was introduced into ordinary life.
Diogenes Laertius
Wordsworth, William
Work, Henry Clay
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