| abstract | - "The miraculous orb soared, shimmering with iridescent hues, across the awed faces of those gathered around." This is not okay if you are writing about a toddler with one of those bubble-blowing rings. It sounds stupid. An example of the very extreme of Purple Prose would be something like writing a book review and saying you were overzealous to finish the book and a wave of nostalgia swept you as you closed it... we're getting into Troper Tales now, though.
* Different people also have different tolerance levels of purple prose, probably based on levels of literacy. I'm a superfast reader who's been reading ahead of my age for years, and I can tear through Lovecraft with no problem. But readers who prefer to take it slower and/or don't understand what half the words mean are likely to get frustrated with it.
* This troper considers himself extremely literate. However, he absolutely despises Purple Prose. There is just something about an author using (and misusing) larger words in order to sound more intelligent that rubs me the wrong way. More often than not, using smaller words is actually better than going out of your way to show off your vocabulary. Writing in purple prose is similar to painting with the most expensive brushes and paints you can find. You're showing that you have the tools to do something well, but the less expensive tools are often just as good or better.
* What's with Purple Prose, anyway, really? I mean, flowery words that add a clearer understanding are fine, but if, say, you used egress instead of door, it doesn't add any more meaning, it just shows the reader that you know what the word egress means/you own a thesaurus.
* You've just indirectly answered your own question; you don't need to use more obscure words in most contexts, but how else are the readers going to know how smart you are?
* I think the word "egress" is cute and I like reading it... Personally, I think that ghettoizing thousands of nice English words just because they aren't widely known is waste of the richness of this language.
* This.
* This troper disagrees that it has much to do with literacy. Yes, literacy and vocabulary size are a factor, just like attention spans. But it's not just about that. Writing is meant to evoke images and do that effectively, so that the reader can imagine things on the run and remain captivated by the story. Using long words when shorter words would do wrecks your pacing and is not effective. Showing off your vocabulary instead of using more common words is not effective, either. The reason those words are common is because we need them, and that is why they themselves, as words, are invisible and unobtrusive - much like the "said" versus "stated/exclaimed/inquired" issue. Long and exotic words, on the other hand, are often unknown to the reader because their meaning is far more specific and limited than the author probably suspects (actual Purple Prose very often contains word that are blatantly falsely used). Even if it isn't, simply by bringing the word outside of its usual context you draw attention to it, make the prose obtrusive and distract from the story. Hence why "ear" is a better word for writing than "auditory organ" - the latter term has connotations that just get in the way.
* I appreciate that (as someone stated above) people's tolerance levels vary, but it does bug me that It Was a Dark and Stormy Night is always held up as an example of purple prose. It seems to me to be a pretty good and atmospheric piece of descriptive writing -- marred only by the fact that those first seven words have become a cliché.
* I think it's a case of being common in Purple Prose works rather than an example in itself.
* Orbs. ORBS. If I see this word one more time, I think I might punch a baby. I remember being a thirteen-year-old Neopian, roleplaying wolves and thinking that this was the coolest word ever. But seriously, if there's a single bit of purple prose by fanfic writers and roleplayers the Internet over that makes me want to scream, it is this word. ORBS. That is all. Thank you, have a nice day.
* My glistening blue orbs totally filmed over with a sheet of salty sorrow at this unfair comment.
* Would you rather see 'curved spherical photon receptor cells with a dark pinpoint ringed by a coloured iris and containing a clear gelatinous substance near the nose and above the mouth' all the time?
* ...yes.
* What bothers me, is when a characters eyes are described as "[color] orbs". The entire eye is an orb, but the iris is a circle on front of an orb.
* I agree with the above troper. "Blue orbs" makes me think of solid blue eyeballs.
* Somewhat controversial trope I guess. The way I see it what is bad about this type of writing is that it usually involves essentially replacing ordinary words with words you find in the thesaurus. Florid writing is fine if the writer actually understands what they are saying and use fancy words because of their connotations, not despite of them. For example you could easily make the page quote on Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian much simpler, but you'd actually be destroying the meaning then. If Conan "walked around" instead of "treading the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet" you would lose significant information about both the Cimmerian and the world he lives in that was crammed into that paragraph. Other writers like this include Lovecraft, Tolkien, and Dickens.
* The final problem is that any individual reader is charged with deciding where florid ends and purple begins. Robert E. Howard is a great example; some may find his work unbearably overwritten, while others would embrace its excessiveness. As in so many things, YMMV.
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