Purple Prose and Languages
I hope this doesn't sound hypocritical of me - but I really detest purple prose in the English language. This isn't because I have some kind of fear or hate of long words, and it's hopefully not because I'm too much of an uncultured philistine to grasp the true magnificence of overly complex prose. Hopefully, it might just be because I understand a little bit about languages... ...The term actually comes from Horace's Ars Poetica (lines 14-21), where he talks about "purpureus" (literally "a purple thing"), describing flashy poetic asides that don't need to be there by comparing them to sewing purple patches on your clothing. Because of how prohibitively expensive purple dye was (it allegedly took 10,000 to 12,000 of B. brandaris , the carnivorous sea snails used to make the dye, just to make one gram), purple was a symbol of status, wealth and luxury that people would try to copy by sewing purple patches on their clothing. This was b...