I am a word person. Give me a
simile, a
metaphor,
alliteration, a
snazzy verb and I'm happy. My friend, Sheila, loves the word flummoxed. Great word. The one I get a kick out of the most is cacophony. It's a word full of
onomatopoeia, hard sounds, sounds that describe what it means. And every time I find it in a book or article I'm quite excited. Perhaps it's because a few years ago, when teaching 8th grade at Sonoran Science Academy, I had a dad come in to take issue with one of the words on the kids' weekly vocabulary list. He had never heard of cacophony and certainly never heard it used. Huh? So every time I see it, I can envision him standing on the other side of my desk smirking at me. So take this sir. I just found it again!
"I ducked through the barbed wire and heard the sputtering engine of the ATV beneath the cacophony of crackling wood." -from Mercy Kill (Armstrong), page 127
"Their voices were like ladders of sound --- up several notches, down a few, up and up again, and in that queer syncopated rhythm that might have sounded cacophonous to somebody else but sounded to her like harmony." -from Biting the Moon (Grimes) page 6
"It was so quiet he could hear the cacophony of frogs from Wildcat Creek a quarter mile to the south." - from Pray for Silence (Castillo) pgs. 2
"As I start toward the front door, the forest around me comes alive with a cacophony of rickets and frogs from the creek." - from Pray for Silence (Castillo) pg. 173
"This remark earned me the sensation of my head splitting in two as a bloodcurdling shriek tore through the air. A cacophony of horrifying sounds followed. They were so painful I sand to my knees, and covered my head with my arms." - from A Discovery of Witches (Harkness) pg. 371
"She slept poorly for months until it bacame part of her, until she had to listen consionsly to her the cacophony. And now, back in the middle of nowhere, the silence seemed alien." - from The Weird Sisters (Brown) Chapter 21, disk 9
"Jet-lagged and exhausted, we went to sleep early -- or rather we went to our beds and lay in them with pillows covering our heads to block out the thumping cacophony that issued through the floorboards, which grew so loud that at one point I thought surely the revelers had invaded my room." - from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (Riggs) pg. 72
I am a word person. Give me a simile, a metaphor, alliteration, a snazzy verb and I'm happy. My friend, Sheila, loves the word flummoxed. Great word. The one I get a kick out of the most is cacophony. It's a word full of onomatopoeia, hard sounds, sounds that describe what it means. And every time I find it in a book or article I'm quite excited. Perhaps it's because a few years ago, when teaching 8th grade at Sonoran Science Academy, I had a dad come in to take issue with one of the words on the kids' weekly vocabulary list. He had never heard of cacophony and certainly never heard it used. Huh? So every time I see it, I can envision him standing on the other side of my desk smirking at me. So take this sir. I just found it again!
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