Mark Twain: The Master Phrasemaker

Mark Twain wrote: “Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong word. To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. Take the time to find those words. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Here are some of his words from A Tramp Abroad:

We met many big keel boats on their way up, using sails, mule power, and profanity—a tedious and laborious business.

… shuddered out a prayer

… as succinct as an invoice

… more trouble than a tax collector

… but we escaped, and I never regretted it

It grew quite dark, now, and the wind began to rise. It welled through the swaying branches of the trees and swept our decks in fitful gusts.

The clustered brown towers perched on the green hilltop and the old battlemented stone wall, stretching up and over the grassy ridge and disappearing in the leafy sea beyond, made a picture whose grace and beauty entirely satisfied the eye.

… opulent stock of misinformation.

… disordered imagination

… startles a stranger out of his self-possession

… a frowsy, bare-legged girl

… the trees had witnessed the assaults of men 

… how ungraspable is the fact 

The first thing I calculate to do when I get through is to just sit down and forget it. It won’t take me long, and I don’t mind the time.

Writing about the Black Forest: one cannot describe those noble woods, nor the feeling with which they inspire him. A feature of the feeling, however, is a deep sense of contentment: another feature of it is a buoyant, boyish gladness. And a third and very conspicuous feature of it is one sense of remoteness of the workday world and his entire emancipation from it and its affairs. These words stretched unbroken over an advanced region and everywhere they are such dense woods and so still and so piney and fragrant. A rich cathedral gloom pervades the pillared Isles; So that the stray flecks of sunlight that strike a trunk here and a bow yonder are strongly accented, and when they strike the most they fairly seem to burn. But the weirdest effect and the most enchanting, is that produced by the diffused light of the low afternoon sun; no single ray is able to pierce its way in, then, but the diffused light takes color from moss and foliage, and pervades the place like a faint, green tinted mist, the theatrical fire of fairyland. The suggestion of mystery and the supernatural which haunts the forest at all times is intensified by this unearthly glow.

… out of the deep grave in my memory

… a loose jointed, long-legged, toe headed, jeans clad, countrified cub of about 16

… the place is a sheltered, reposeful woodland nook, remote from noise and stir and confusion

We visited two long, covered wooden bridges which spanned the green and brilliant Reuss just below where it goes plunging and hurrahing out of the lake.

He said that between fools and guidebooks, a man could acquire ignorance enough in 24 hours in a country like this to last him a year.

There was a very attractive little hotel close by, but our energies were not conquered yet, so we went on

And how we did sleep!–for there is no opiate like Alpine pedestrianism.

When the fog blew aside a little and we saw that we were treading the rampart of a precipice and that our left elbows were projecting over a perfectly boundless and bottomless vacancy we gasped and jumped for the railway-ties again.

The cloven valleys of the lower world swam in a tinted mist which veiled the ruggedness of their crags and ribs and ragged forests, and turned all the forbidding region into a soft and rich and sensuous paradise.

… till I came under the petrifying influence of your turgid intellect

… unfettered enjoyment

… so deaf and dumb and dead to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a Puritan in paradise.

… beautiful cascades that leap from those rugged heights, robed in powdery spray, ruffled with foam, and girdled with rainbows

There was a lake here, in the lamp of the great mountains, the green slopes that rose toward the lower crags were graced with scattered Swiss cottages nestling among miniature farms and gardens and from out of a leafy ambuscade in the upper heights tumbled a brawling cataract.

Without a guide, travel is a bitter harassment, a purgatory of little exasperating annoyances, a ceaseless and pitiless punishment to an irascible man who has no business capacity and is confused by details.

… the dome of the Jungfrau softly outlined against the sky and faintly silvered by the Starlight. There was something subduing in the influence of that silence and solemn and awful presence; one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal face-to-face and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice, a spirit which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a vanished race of men and judged them; and would judge a million more–and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable after all life should be gone and the earth had become a vacant desolation.

Here the rushing brook becomes a mad torrent and goes booming and thundering down toward [the town], lashing and thrashing its way over and among monster boulders, and hurling chance roots and logs like straws.

… storm-swept and smileless desolation

… the frost and tempest of unnumbered ages had battered and hacked at these cliffs, with a deathless energy, destroying them piecemeal; so the region about their bases was a tumbled chaos of great fragments which had been split off and hurled to the ground.

… this spectacle always chained one’s interest and admiration, and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world.

… the summit of our ambition

… hideous desolation

… soften his brain or petrify it