Mo's Rather Interesting World of Figures of Speech and Other Rhetorical Devices

#10 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.

Yes, after a break for Inspiration, MRIWFSORD is back, and more rhetorical than ever.

Tmesis

Literally, something like "cutting".

Means: inserting something into the middle of a word. Usually a compound word, although you can do it within an ordinary word too if you like, or even within a syllable.

Examples: things like abso-bloody-lutely, hi-diddly-ho, any old how. Note that whatsoever was originally a tmesis (and hyphenated accordingly) but has become accepted as a word in its own right.

OK, this one isn't very exciting, but tmesis is a good word, isn't it? (In Yorkshire of course it means something different, namely: what you set t'cats on.)

Tag Clouder

This might be of interest to those of you who use tags a lot -- it's a little toy to generate a "tag cloud" along the lines of the LJ popular interests page (except it shows tags used by a user, not interests across users) a la flickr, del.icio.us etc.

You can enter your own username or that of anyone else you're interested in -- it only draws on public entries, though. Click on a tag to see the list of entries that use it.

Any thoughts about how to improve it much welcomed -- plus please do feel free to pass it to anyone else who'd be interested!

It's at: http://www.holkar.net/cgi-bin/undying/tag_clouder.pl


(Well, it's more fun than working.)

Mark Oaten's website

Is here.

When he says, a few lines down the 'Mark in Westminster' section, "Prostitution strategy a missed opportunity", you definitely get the feeling that this is an issue close to his heart...