henpecked | Bertram's Blog

A Fowl Day

September 15, 2014 — Pat Bertram

Today was clear, dry, and hot. The outside temperature reached 100 degrees, which could be why we didn’t have fowl weather on such a fowl day. (Fowl weather, I imagine, is weather that gets the geese flying south for the winter.)

I’m no spring chicken, which is especially apparent on fowl days such as this. I’ve been running around like a . . .

Nope, I can’t say it. I’ve never seen a chicken running around with its head cut off, though I suppose the bodies of chickens can last a few seconds without their brain — after all, the expression “hen-brained” must have come from somewhere. Still, whether I use the chicken metaphor or stick to the unfeathered truth, I have been rather busy today, running seemingly unending errands, dealing with visitors and various hospice workers, fighting an invasion of ants.

When I was out, I stopped to see a small camper for rent, a refinished 1955 Field and Stream 14-foot trailer. I’m not actually looking for something like that. I’m not sure my car could tow it, don’t particularly want the problem of parking it somewhere, and I’m afraid I’d feel cooped up. (Aha! Another fowl metaphor!) Still, it’s fun thinking about perhaps crisscrossing the roads in a portable roost to see what is on the other side of the country.

As much fun as it has been to use so many fowl metaphors, one I will never use is “henpecked.” I once saw a poor hen-pecked rooster, and oh, what a sad and bloody sight that was.

I hope you have a ducky day today!

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, andDaughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Connect with Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in blogging, culture. Tags: chicken metaphors, chicken with its head cut off, ducky day, fowl weather, hen-brained, henpecked. 5 Comments »

A Store Walking Down the Street

November 7, 2009 — Pat Bertram

I recently came across this sentence in a novel: “It was the kind of store I loved to see walking down the street when I was a kid.” Whoooo. I’d like to see any kind of store walking down the street!

I was thinking about that particular gaffe while I was walking down the street today. I happened to see something that made me realize the sentence wasn’t totally ludicrous — a house rolling passed me. Okay, it was being towed, but still, it was moving along the street instead of being securely attached to a foundation.

Something else I saw: a henpecked rooster. Not a pretty sight! That poor thing was pecked raw by the hens. I will never again use the word henpecked, though to be honest, I’m not sure I ever did.

Many words outlive their usefulness and become meaningless clichés, such as pitch black. Does anyone today even know what pitch is? I had to look it up. It’s a black, sticky substance from the distillation of tar. What about hair the color of a raven’s wing. Have you ever seen a raven’s wing up close? Perhaps you saw a crow. I don’t know enough about birds to tell the difference, but I do know that comparing hair to a crow’s wing doesn’t portray the same poetic image. And why are writers still referring to the squeals of stuck pigs? Some clichés are of more recent standing, such as a stuffed briefcase. If you saw someone with a briefcase, how would you know how full it was?

Clichés, poorly constructed sentences, and unnecessary bits of exposition should be eliminated during the editing process. Today’s Daughter Am I blog tour stop includes a segment of Daughter Am I that remained in the book up until a week before publication. It’s not a bad excerpt, but it added nothing except a bit more history to a novel that already had a lot of history.

You can see the segment here: Dead Darling from Daughter Am I.

Click here to buy Daughter Am I from Second Wind Publishing, LLC.