1. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada

    Juxtaposition

    Discussion in 'Word games' started by Louanne Learning, Jan 7, 2023.

    I remember reading somewhere that the juxtaposition of an unlikely pair made for good writing.

    In this thread, suggest two things that normally don't go together (in words or image) for the purpose of the members to write a few sentences tying the two together, using your suggestion as a prompt.

    You can either suggest a new prompt or write based on a prompt given.

    I'll go first. Use the photo below as a prompt. Write a few fictitious sentences tying them together.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jan 7, 2023
  2. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    [​IMG]
     
  3. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada

    "Mayor McCheese has been sleeping with my wife."

    "Oh! That's not Gouda."

    "I can't sleep, I can't eat."

    "What you need is a Happy Meal. It'll make everything better."

    "Can I get it with nuggets?"

    "Oh yes, it's for both boys and girls."

    "I'm gonna get that Mayor McCheese!"

    "With fries?"
     
  4. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    New prompt - good and bad


    [​IMG]
     
  5. Catriona Grace

    Catriona Grace Mind the thorns Contributor Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Feb 24, 2021
    Messages:
    6,260
    Likes Received:
    5,506
    "I always knew you were rotten to the core, Gala."
     
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  6. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Lol
     
  7. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Commandments to be broke,
    Vice to your heart’s content,
    Rack up the big misdeeds,
    License to you is sent.

    Bad seed? Well, it’s okay.
    Shakespeare, the bard, did crow:
    Nothing is good or bad,
    But thinking makes it so.
     
  8. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Detective Razor slammed his hands on the table. "You're a penny-ante crook," he bellowed to the seated perp. "Guys like you think you're so smart, but you're a dime a dozen. I'm liable to break your neck."

    "Whoa, whoa," Detective Robin said, then took a seat opposite the perp and leaned forward, looking him in the eye. "I know you got your reasons. I understand. You can tell me. I'm here to help you."

    The perp looked from Robin to Razor and back to Robin again. "You're using the common interrogation strategy in which you make a distinction between good and bad behavior in order to gain an advantage over me."

    Razor and Robin tucked in their chins.

    "It's a psychological tactic," the perp said, then leaned back in his chair. "But I'll tell you what—I'm going to cooperate."

    "Why?"

    "Because the principle of reciprocity ensures that you will feel obligated to give back to me if I give to you."

    Razor and Robin dropped their jaws. "Man, you're good," Robin said.

    "Nah," the perp said, "I'm bad."
     
    Jlivy3 likes this.
  9. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    New prompt - young and old

    [​IMG]
     
  10. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    'What are you doing, Grandma?"

    "I'm colouring outside the lines."

    "Outside the lines! At school, they teach us to stay inside the lines."

    "That's the patriarchy, dear. And it was worse in my day."

    "Worse?"

    "Oh yes, and there were fewer colours."

    "Should I colour outside the lines, too?"

    "It's up to you. You have something called personal agency. Never give it away."

    "Isn't giving a good thing?"

    "Some things are best shared, like friendship and love. But other things, like your sense of self, belong just to you."

    "I love you, Grandma."

    "I love you, too."
     
  11. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    new prompt - life and death

    [​IMG]
     
  12. off

    off Banned

    Joined:
    Dec 26, 2022
    Messages:
    75
    Likes Received:
    37
    Location:
    Canada
    Currently Reading::
    Obstructed by Lightning; Unsalted Boundaries; And: The Separation of Nouns, verbs and Adjectives in Prehistoric Languages
    Juxtapositions

    Dieters' Digest. (A journal.)
    Max-min theory. (Math.)
    In my spare time I make miniature statuettes of mythical giants.
    Mr. Small, it's awful big of you!
    Don't sweat the dry season.
    Schwartz auf Weiss.
    Iron Butterfly (early 1970s band)
    He made a god awful mess.
    The difference is day and night.
    The Beauty and the Beast
    The solution is as clear as mud to me.
     
    Last edited: Jan 12, 2023
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  13. off

    off Banned

    Joined:
    Dec 26, 2022
    Messages:
    75
    Likes Received:
    37
    Location:
    Canada
    Currently Reading::
    Obstructed by Lightning; Unsalted Boundaries; And: The Separation of Nouns, verbs and Adjectives in Prehistoric Languages
    Personnel agencies are particular about not needing to see your personal agency.
     
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  14. off

    off Banned

    Joined:
    Dec 26, 2022
    Messages:
    75
    Likes Received:
    37
    Location:
    Canada
    Currently Reading::
    Obstructed by Lightning; Unsalted Boundaries; And: The Separation of Nouns, verbs and Adjectives in Prehistoric Languages
    Life and Death
    Juxtaposing the two prompts: Juxtapositions and Life and Death

    Only the living have a concept of death. The dead -- we think, but we don't know -- have no concept of life.

    I have personal account of this.

    I walked into a bar in Amsterdam. I like their stout beer: it shouts at you, "you are nothing but a naught! A bought and sold Kraut in the middle of the draught! Fraught with a stubby snout!" I asked the bartender how come his beer can pass the Turing test, while it is an inanimate liquid with no central nervous system or mind; the tender answered tenderly, "There is a microchip with the recorded message, an amplifier with a tiny speaker, and a battery imbedded in the mug."

    Hence I got reassured, that dead matter can't think, therefore it does not exist as a sentient being.

    There are little joys in life given by huge, larger than life, almost deadly insights about life and death.
     
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  15. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Joseph spent his days out front of the office building with a cardboard sign that read Help out a Veteran. Most people hustled by, but the man in the tan jacket always stopped to chat.

    "Oh, so you're from Quebec?" the man repeated upon learning this information. "I've never been."

    "Little bit of Europe, right here," Joseph filled him in. "Like my Mom's cooking. She made the best tourtière."

    "With my Mom, it was cabbage rolls. She always added dill. Man, they were incredible."

    Such a simple conversation, but it brought great happiness to Joseph. "I want to thank you for taking the time," he said to the man.

    "Oh, it's the least I can do."

    "Means the world to me."

    Yes, the smallest things mean the most. A small kindness that cost the man nothing, but gave Joseph his humanity.

    "I enjoy talking with you," the man said.

    Joseph put his hands over his heart. "Your goodness is as big as the universe itself."
     
    off likes this.
  16. off

    off Banned

    Joined:
    Dec 26, 2022
    Messages:
    75
    Likes Received:
    37
    Location:
    Canada
    Currently Reading::
    Obstructed by Lightning; Unsalted Boundaries; And: The Separation of Nouns, verbs and Adjectives in Prehistoric Languages

    The Pet Shop Girl

    A Personal Experience

    This is the sort of thing that happens to you randomly, and it wrenches your heart at the same time that it makes you feel life is totally worth living.

    I was in a run-down section of town, in the store of a popular second-hand retailer chain. I wanted to buy some fishing rods, it's April now, and summer is almost upon us.

    I noticed this girl. She looked a bit run-down too, though she appeared to be young. She had that down-beat look about herself, that abused children have. She was slim, which gave her an air of cocaine addiction. She wasn't overly clean, and it turns out she was shy. She was very good looking, inasmuch as all girls in their twenties who manage to say slim are very good looking. She had buck teeth, which I find appealing, mousy brown hair, which is my preference in hair colour. My ethnic background is of dark-haired people, and I like a woman with very light skin, and of a no-mustache assertion of pre-ethnicity.

    It took me five seconds to notice she had been following me. I turned into an isle to give her way, and she passed me as I was in the side-isle, but she stopped, and was not looking at merchandise. I came out of my hiding and proceeded toward the exit. She asked me, in a very thin, respectable, young, weak voice:

    "Excuse me, sir... brakljghr." I was at a watershed of behaviour; was she a hooker, trying to get a john, or was she something else? Should I rudely send her on her way, or should I be nice like everyone else is in this town? I put on a nice smile, not a fake one, and leaned forward, and said,

    "Sorry, young lady, I am a bit hard on hearing. Please repeat." I'm 59, and though I am only 5'4", she was ever so slightly but still shorter than I. She said,

    "Sir, do you know if there is a pet shop around here?" Her voice was weak, tiny, apologetic and fearful.

    I felt I was the one she most trusted in the entire store.

    I said,

    "Sorry, young lady, I am here in this part of town for the first time in your life. And in mine."

    She politely thanked me, and I left her there.

    I took a quick inventory of my sensations, to see if I could recall a feeling of someone pickpocketing me, should she have been working with a partner. No. There had been no pickpocketing, no hooking, no soliciting. She truly wanted only to know where the nearest pet shop was located. She had been circling me as someone approachable, non-threatening, acceptable to accost with a harmless, innocent question.

    This filled me with the infinite joy of feeling protective. The infinite joy of encountering innocence and harmlessness. The sight of a real maid in real distress, in real need of a real knight in real, shining, white armour.

    I felt like crying, of sentimentality. I felt for the girl, yet I was still too commitment-phobic to make a go at this girl. God only knows where she'd come from. A poster child for a book by Charles Dickens. Used. Abused. Reused, reabused, recycled, and reabused again. End product of a series of foster homes, at the end of the line of the factory smell, falling off the belt of human bi-products. Ever so beautiful, perfect, precious in her shining beauty of shamed and blamed existence.

    She was wonderful, she was a wonder. She was as close to a miracle as a human can be.

    She wanted... food. For her pet.

    She loved that animal, I supposed. She loved her cat or kitten more than she had ever felt loved by anyone. She loved the kitten with all the hot and burning tears that she had to choke back in her young life. She was out of the abused situation; she was living on welfare, probably, and she starved and she was lost, because her IQ was probably not high, either, but that's an unconfirmed opinion. She had one thing that was solid in her life at this time, and that was her pet; the love the pet gave her, and the love she had for her pet.

    She drove herself into sacrifice for her pet: she asked a stranger. She was not normally that forward or that forceful. Need drives one sometimes to unethical, sometimes to criminal, and yet sometimes -- like this time -- to daring behaviour. She was much more withdrawn and shy on any given day than to accost a stranger. She was hungry, she felt the hunger of her meowing cat, she felt the joy of feeling someone else's emotion, feeling someone else's need, she was delirious with being needed by someone. She was in love with her own love she felt for her kitten. She would have bought that cat food if it cost her life.

    I left her there. I felt then, and I feel now, and will probably feel forever guilty for that... for using and abusing her. I used her because I gained some real, and strong emotions from my encounter with her. I used her because she enriched my life greatly by gifting me with the ability to cry that day. I abused her because all I did, was take, take, take from her; I have taken from her emotional riches, gold, ruby and diamonds in denominations of tears and an infinite joy of sorrow. Yet I never returned her anything of value for the great treasure she had given me.

    Heck, I could not even tell her where the nearest pet shop was located.

    Funny how life can be a bitch, and yet at other times it resembles so totally a holographic fractal of metaphysical mirroring.
    ----------------------
    I wrote this ten years ago. I know because I say there that I was 59 at the time, and I'm now 69.

    It was at a particularly prolific time in my life in literary output. That has its own story.

    Min-max theory.
     
    B.E. Nugent and Louanne Learning like this.
  17. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Diving into the earth, and then emerging again, in waves we call generations, in a cycle of death and rebirth, matter absorbing energy from the sun, beginning food chains, some energy lost at each level, till the low-energy molecules find their way back into the earth, to be reborn again, thanks to the sun, and the wave continues, in and out of the earth, skimming, birth and death and birth and death all over, a never-ending cycle, each relies on the other, in and out of the earth.
     
  18. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    New prompt - use one of the juxtapositions from the opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities:

    "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way..."
     
  19. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

    Joined:
    Dec 24, 2019
    Messages:
    12,458
    Likes Received:
    13,502
    Location:
    Way, way out there
    Strangely (or perhaps not) similar to the juxtapositions of opposites found in Genesis: Being/Nothingness, Order/Chaos, Life/Death, Knowledge/Ignorance, Work/Rest, Above/Below, Water/Land, Heaven/Earth, Light/Darkness, Day/Night, Good/Evil, Man/Woman. There are probably more, that's from memory.
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2023
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  20. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

    Joined:
    Dec 24, 2019
    Messages:
    12,458
    Likes Received:
    13,502
    Location:
    Way, way out there
    Or Yin and Yang, which is built from opposites:

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Jan 17, 2023
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  21. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    Or Aristotle's Concept of the Golden Mean, with its excesses and deficiencies

    [​IMG]
     
    Xoic likes this.
  22. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    I was reading this morning about surrealism in literature. Apparently, one of its characteristics is juxtaposition. Surrealistic writers often take juxtaposition to an extreme, comparing things one would never expect to find together, like a precious piece of jewelry and a cordless drill.

    Copied below from https://examples.yourdictionary.com/surrealism-in-literature-characteristics-and-examples.html

    Surrealistic works often emphasize the juxtaposition from a person’s dreams or fantasy life and the reality in which they live. When a book reveals a sequence of what a character fantasizes about doing followed by their actual actions, which are completely different, that is juxtaposition.
     
    Xoic likes this.
  23. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

    Joined:
    Dec 24, 2019
    Messages:
    12,458
    Likes Received:
    13,502
    Location:
    Way, way out there
    Here's a surreal juxtaposition, done visually:

    [​IMG]

    I often find I get good inspiration or ideas from visual work or music that can apply toward story ideas. Not sure that's the case here, but you can clearly see dream elements blended with (waking) reality plus weird visual juxtapositions.
     
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  24. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

    Joined:
    Dec 24, 2019
    Messages:
    12,458
    Likes Received:
    13,502
    Location:
    Way, way out there
    And really that's the juxtaposition of conscious and unconscious modes of thought.
     
    Louanne Learning likes this.
  25. Louanne Learning

    Louanne Learning Happy Wonderer Contributor Contest Winner 2023 Contest Winner 2022

    Joined:
    Jun 9, 2022
    Messages:
    5,666
    Likes Received:
    3,661
    Location:
    Canada
    And that's the basis for surrealist art

    Surrealism: The Art Of The Unconscious Mind
     

Share This Page

  1. This site uses cookies to help personalise content, tailor your experience and to keep you logged in if you register.
    By continuing to use this site, you are consenting to our use of cookies.
    Dismiss Notice