a purple passage ［patch］/ Turn of phrase, overwrought

To young theatregoers, Tennessee Williams's depictions of sex and homosexuality may seem overwrought. But for his time he was radical. If by the end of his life his work seemed rather old-fashioned, it was he who had made the fashion. The playwright died on this day in 1983



Turn of phrase
A particular arrangement of words, as in I'd never heard that turn of phrase before, or An idiom can be described as a turn of phrase. This idiom alludes to the turning or shaping of objects (as on a lathe), a usage dating from the late 1600s.

Meaning

A distinctive spoken or written expression.

Origin

'Turn of phrase' is a commonplace but rather odd expression - in what sense can a phrase be 'turned'? Ladies are, or at least used to be, sometimes described as having 'well-turned' legs/thighs/ankles, but that derives from an allusion to the symmetry and precision of wood turning, which hardly seems appropriate for an abstract entity like a phrase.

What is a phrase anyway? Well, there's no exact definition and so it depends on who you ask. Had you been around in 1530 when the word 'phrase' was coined, you would have been wise not to have asked the language scholar John Palsgrave. It was he who first the word into print but, confusingly, gave two differing examples of its meaning. Palsgrave's aim was to help Englishmen to learn to speak French and to that end he published Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse, the first grammar of the French language.

Palsgrave illustrated the meaning of the word 'phrase' by giving examples of phrases in English with their French equivalents.

"Whan all is doone and sayd, pour tout potaige - a phrasis."

In that illustration he was using the meaning of the word as we now understand it, that is, 'a small group or collocation of words expressing a single notion; a common or idiomatic expression'. That 'collection of words' definition of 'phrase' is hardly unambiguous and could just as well be used for 'idiom', 'saying' or 'expression'. There are also many other linguistic terms that, while they have specialised uses, can all lay claim to being phrases - 'proverbs', 'adages', 'maxims', 'clichés' and so on. Added to that, Palsgrave gave us an entirely different definition of what Tudor gentry understood by the word 'phrase', that is, not words at all but a 'manner or style of speech or writing'. In the same French/English grammar he remarked on "The differences of phrasys betwene our tong and the frenche tong". He went on to explain "The phrasys of our tong and theyrs differeth". By that he meant, not that the English and French use different expressions (which even the most untutored student would surely have known) but that the French have a different manner and style of speaking to the English.

That 'style of speaking or writing' meaning gives us a lead in explaining how a phrase can be said to be 'turned'. Before the advent of printing the beauty of written texts was judged not only on their content but also on the quality of the writer's calligraphy - much as Japanese Haiku is appreciated today. The word 'style' derives from the tool used for writing, the stylus, and to the mediaeval mind writing style was as much about the craft of calligraphy as it was about the ideas conveyed in the text. An early handwritten example of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, circa 1386, used 'style' with that meaning:

Therfore Petrak writeth this storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth.

So, a phrase was a style of speaking or writing, and style meant beauty of expression. We can now interpret a fine 'turn of phrase' as analogous to a skilfully-crafted piece of wood turned on a lathe. John Dryden referred to the 'turning' of words in this sense in The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, 1693:

Had I time, I cou'd enlarge on the Beautiful Turns of Words and Thoughts; which are as requisite in this, as in Heroique Poetry.

Benjamin Franklin - first with many things - appears to have been the first to use the precise expression 'turn of phrase' in his Letters, 1779:

A new version [of the Bible], in which, preserving the sense, the turn of phrase and manner of expression should be modern.

See also: Coin a phrase.

purple

• [pə'ːrpl]
• 
  

[名][U]

1 紫色；深紅色；赤ワイン色.

2 ((the 〜))紫の布；（特にもと高位高官者が着用した）紫衣.

3 枢機卿(けい)の地位［職務］；司教［主教］の地位［職務］；((the 〜))帝位, 王位, 王子の地位；高官の地位.

be born to ［in］ the purple

((文))帝王［王侯貴族］の家に生まれる；非常な特権階級にある.

━━[形]（more 〜, most 〜；時に-pler, -plest）

1 紫色の；深紅色の

turn ［go］ purple with anger
激怒する.

2 帝王の, 国王の；王侯の.

3 華麗な, 豪華な；〈文体が〉（そこだけが目立って）美文調の, 華麗な

a purple passage ［patch］
華麗な章句.

4 感傷的でオーバーな, きわどい.

━━[動](他)(自)紫色にする［なる］.

［古英語purpure. 2番目の-r-は異化により-l-に変わった. ⇒MARBLE］

purple patch, an over‐written passage in which the writer has strained too hard to achieve an impressive effect, by elaborate figures or other means. The phrase (Latin, purpureus pannus) was first used by the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica (c.20 BCE) to denote an irrelevant and excessively ornate passage; the sense of irrelevance is normally absent in modern usage, although such passages are usually incongruous. By extension, ‘purple prose’ is lavishly figurative, rhythmic, or otherwise overwrought. See also bombast, fustian.

òverwróught[òver・wróught]

[動]overworkの過去・過去分詞形.

━━[形]

1 張りつめた, 過度に興奮した

overwrought nerves
張りつめた神経.

2 凝り［飾り］すぎた

overwrought style of architecture
凝りすぎた建築様式.

3 ((古))疲れ果てた.