Saturday 30 March 2019

'Somewhere a dog barked' trope on languagehat.com


‘The somewhere a dog barked’ trope was indulged in by Iris Murdoch in The Sea, The Sea. I am not sure but that she was being mischievous. The owl makes me feel a slight tug. It’s the salad cream on the sausage.

“Shadows were strong , and the brooding identity of everything I passed so powerful that I kept nervously looking back. The silence was vast, different in quality from the foggy silence of the morning, punctured now and then by an owl’s cry or the barking of a distant dog.”

Following this trope has been going on since 2010 on languagehat.com
somewhere a dog barked
It’s now running at 148 anfractuose scholarly comments taking in Mongolian yurt approach ettiquette, Turkic saws, botch and bungle, usw.


4 comments:

john doyle said...

Birds. The usual suspects -- mockingbirds, cardinals, robins, doves, a wren, a crow, a flicker. Some sort of warbler. No owls. And traffic, the constant sussurus intermittently amplified by the distinctive whines and hums and growls of individual vehicles passing by. No barking. In my half-hour morning walk I saw one human and one dog, the two of them leashed together, the human saying something soft and encouraging to the dog, who seemed happy enough to be going along with the program.

ombhurbhuva said...

Bob Dylan ringing the changes; All along the Watchtower.
Outside in the cold distance
A wild cat did growl


john doyle said...

For Dylan it was outside in the distance; Hendrix made it cold -- one of those songs where the cover seems like the original.

ombhurbhuva said...

Outside is definitely more tropeish. An unlocated bark, howl, hoot, growl out there somewhere a pret a porter atmosphere.