When a British tabloid reporter writing about a crocodile attack needed a synonym for crocodile, he went with knobbly monster, now a joking term for similarly creative ways of avoiding repetition. Juliet and Matthew Maguire, described by The Guardian newspaper as a pair of married monographers, present delightful real-life examples of this type of elegant variation in their new book The Little Book of Second Mentions: The Art of Avoiding Repetition (Amazon). Among them: the horizontal sleeping surface, a substitute for bed, and unfortunate ungulate, from a news story about a sheep trapped inside a car. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Avoiding Repetition with Knobbly Monsters”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette, and I have a new bit of slang that I learned this week, Grant.
It’s knobbly monster.
Knobbly, is that with a K?
K-N-O-B-B-L-Y?
Yes, knobbly monster.
What is a knobbly monster?
Well, it’s a term that’s used in British newsrooms.
It originated with one of the tabloids where a reporter was writing about a crocodile attack, but he didn’t want to keep using the word crocodile.
So instead, he referred to it as a knobbly monster.
I bet he caught so much flag in the newsroom for that.
Well, he did, and that term is now used for that second reference.
You know, when you’re trying to be creative, I think every writer has run into that, you know, where you’ve just used the same word over and over, and you want to say it a different way.
Yeah, there’s a term for that.
It’s elegant variation when you’re hard-pressed on the second reference, so you come up with a more elegant way to say something.
Oh, that’s fabulous.
Okay.
Well, I got a couple of other classic elegant variations or knobbly monsters.
One of them is for bed.
Somebody referred to that as the horizontal sleeping surface.
Oh, goodness.
And one more, the unfortunate ungulate.
That was when somebody was writing about a sheep stuck in a car.
A sad sheep?
Yeah, that would have been another good third reference.
But anyway, I’m so excited about this new book that’s come out that is a collection of all of these things.
It’s called The Little Book of Second Mentions, The Art of Avoiding Repetition.
And it’s by Juliet and Matthew McGuire, or as the Guardian newspaper describes them, The Married Monographers.
That’s funny.
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