

Howard wrote that Conan the Barbarian was destined to "Tread the Jewelled thrones of the world beneath his sandalled feet" has there been more overblown verbiage in a piece of popular entertainment. The writing style in The Trigan Empire was very purple.See also Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom, for when this is applied to names. When narrators characterise their visual appearance via a Description in the Mirror, the resultant prose oftentimes can be purple.

Some communications open on the traditional Dark and Stormy Night. The most rococo of Narrative Filigree may a'times shade into this. Mills and Boon Prose is a Sub-Trope furthermore, that affliction known as Said Bookism is a customary peculiarity of this mode of communication. Seek furthermore the silicon entries known as: Walls of Text, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, "Burly Detective" Syndrome, and Meaningless Meaningful Words. Some of the examples below are intentional: the Purple Prose is a stylistic choice, a comedic turn or in aid of characterisation.Ĭompare contrastingly with the phenomenon given the appellation of Beige Prose. It should also be noted that Purple Prose usually pairs flamboyant vocabulary with fairly plain grammar (that can get outright primitive in extreme cases) which differentiates it from true Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness. This trope does not cover works in a florid but not intrusive style - the sacrifice of Utility on the altar of Eloquence is an essential feature of Purple Prose.

Several excellent examples, things of beauty and confusion, can be found on the quotes page. (Consistent purple prose at least lets the reader get into the swing of things.) "Purple Patches" is used when the writer only occasionally breaks into purple, like scintillating arrays of diamonds appearing incongruously in mire, which can make much of the text more readable but less consistent, so the reader is jolted from one style to the other. This practice was a common form of displaying pretentiousness in wealth, since purple dye- sourced from a very specific type of snail- was an expensive rarity in those days. The writing style is named after a quote by Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC, making this Older Than Feudalism), who compared writing such prose to sewing purple patches to clothing. In the worst case scenario, such prose will reduce readers to skim-reading for fear of trudging through pages and pages of mundane description slowly and painfully, just as violet-tinted patches on a garment incompatibly hued are agonizing for a human being's photon detectors. note Even looking words up in a dictionary doesn't always help perpetrators of purple prose are notorious for Malapropism, especially when they trust their thesauri.

On occasion, such racks of ornament can be despicable, with the scintillating adjectives bewildering the reader and obfuscating the subject. In response, the writer chooses to indulge in the writing technique known to gentlefolk as Purple Prose, wherein the writing becomes much more florid, eschewing quotidian sentences for elaborate concatenation of phrases and clauses. There are times within the life of any teller of tales (not including the Private Eye Monologue that Film Noir is so fond of) in which they are faced with a situation not most dire but not far removed: the writing, while not lacking in such delightful virtues as a sturdy coherent plot or rich characterization, is supremely dry and uninteresting to read. Terry Pratchett, Notes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real
