A to Z Challenge - ORWELL'S THIRD LAW - D is for Dead

DEAD AS A DOORNAIL
If it's hard and cold, if it grips at
your fingers and
bites at your skin in the frost,
is it really dead?

By using idioms, proverbs and figurative language writers can add levels of emotional and social context in a few well chosen words.


 I am Blogging from A to Z in accordance with Orwell's Third Law of sentence construction. ;)

George Orwell says: 

WHEN WRITING A SENTENCE YOU SHOULD ALWAYS ASK YOURSELF:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What image or idiom will make it clearer?

From Charles Dicken's A CHRISTMAS CAROL 

“Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail.”

Dead. Images don't come more serious or more permanent than dead. 

Our relationship was dead and all that was left was a preserved image, a perfect fossil of how things used to be.


Dead was diamond hard, the incomprehensible end of a transparent process.

As dead as a furred impression in tarmac.

HOW ARE YOUR BLOGPOSTS SHAPING UP? TELL ME, WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER? ;)