I am also amused by a sentence out of this story which has apparently been around for 30 or 40 years, touted as "The Worst Story Ever Written." I don't know whether it actually lives up to its billing--I've read a lot of really bad stories--but it is pretty bad. It was apparently written by a 16-year-old fan boy who swore never to write another--and didn't--because this one was so thoroughly vilified. Poor kid. Anyway, this is the sentence in question:
That loin cloth brandishing the "long steel broad sword" made me chortle, because so much early, purple-prosed romance fiction used identical imagery and euphemisms. I'm not sure how the loincloth also brandished a helmet and sandals at the same time, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. :)The barbarian seated himself upon a stool at the wenches side,
exposing his body, naked save for a loin cloth brandishing a
long steel broad sword, an iron spiraled battle helmet, and a
thick leather sandals, to her unobstructed view.
What are your favorite (or least favorite) euphemisms?
1 comment:
Ever since senior year AP English, when we noticed that the speaker in the section of The Symposium which we were analysing in class spent two sentences talking about lesbians, a paragraph or so about straight couples, and then ran right off the page talking about gay men, I've thought "studying The Symposium" would be a hilarious euphamism for any kind of guy-on-guy action. Unfortunately I have yet to find a good context to use it.
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