EXERCISE

Synonyms are essential to wordplay, as you saw in previous chapters.

Whenever you’re walking someplace or traveling—free, in other
words, to observe a passing scene—find alternative adjectives
for everything you see. The day is bright, glimmering, shimmering,
sunny, clear, limpid. Now switch to alternative nouns: the sun is an
orb, a planetary object, a ball, a fire, an eye, a god. Now verbs.
Most of the good writers I know are constantly rewording things in
their heads. The exercise makes
you better at all kinds of figuring, since synonyms and homonyms lie
behind so much wordplay. Plus,
when the time comes to level a rapid-fire barrage of multiple
synonyms, you’ll be prepared, ready,
locked and loaded, loaded for bear, eager, poised, and all set.
Multiple synonyms create a rhetorical current that sweeps your
audience along until you put your hand up like Moses and make the
whole rhetorical river roll back. You saw the element of surprise in
the Mr. Potato Head, when I threw in an analog that reversed the tone
of the others. This is true of
every kind of catalog. Any list offers an opportunity to throw in a
ringer. One of the great masters of the catalog was the poet Dylan
Thomas, whose short memoir, “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,”
contains all sorts of surprising lists. Here he describes the presents he
would get for Christmas.

THOMAS: Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded

flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap and a machine that
punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once,
by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet …

You can see the order to this list, going from harmless to hazardous.
But in the middle of this great wealth of gifts comes one that isn’t
there—the wished-for catapult (slingshot) that never came.
“Never a catapult” interrupts the breathless list to show the unfulfilled
wish. It raises a laugh when people listen to it. And it reveals
Thomas’s deep psychological understanding of small boys. The
catalog, in his capable hands, is no mere list. Use it not just for
description but also for surprise.