vacua

Time for a confession:

I just had a conversation in which I uttered the word "cool" three times within fifteen seconds or so.

:(  I apologize for my sins against society...

But what's the big deal?  I repeated a word a little too much.  The problem is this:
cool is a vacuous word.
It's vacuous because it doesn't really mean that much.

For example:

Is this cool?

what about this?

literally cool, right?

cool!  awesome!  stuff!

What have we learned?  Nothing!  Sure, all of these pictures are at least mildly impressive, but otherwise they have little in common except that they could be dubbed "cool".

So what does "cool" mean?!

(There will be a contest in the comments for anyone who can give a satisfactory definition of the word "cool"...)

Cool is an awful word and it joins the ranks of other words including "awesome", "very", and "way".

Time for another experiment:
How much do these sentences (the control group) tell you:
"The room was decorated awesomely."
"The room was very decorated."
"The room was way decorated with stuff, and it was way awesome."

Those three sentences told you nothing about the room, aside from the fact that it had decorations that were at least mildly notable.  You have no idea why the room is decorated or what kind of decorations are adorning the room or how much time was put into decorating this room...

Now for some different sentences:
"The room was decorated sumptuously."
"The room was decorated haphazardly."
"The room was exceedingly decorated with bacon, and the smell was overwhelming."

Suddenly you are able to create a much more detailed mental image of the room, it's decorations, and you can even begin to assume some of the circumstances surrounding the decoration of this room.

This is why vacuous words aren't really that helpful, nor impressive, in communicating something well.  But they seem to be ingrained into our psyches or something, because we can't always help using them.  Even Mark Twain had problems with the word "very", and as the story goes, he overcame it by replacing it with another vacuous word, "D@#%", knowing that his editors would more easily remove the vacuous cursing.

It was a D@#% good idea.

Even so, sometimes the word "cool" works out in a song about semi-unrelated items, and it's enjoyable:

So yes, cool has its place, but if someone told me that they had just encountered microbial life on Mars, I doubt I would just say "cool".

metaphora

Metaphors can be as useful as a hole in the head.
They can also be as ambiguous as a hole in the head, because headholes could be bad (like  a mortal wounding) or good (like a mouth, into which bacon can be inserted).

Here are some examples, allegedly written by real life high school students.  So you know they're going to be good.

You can also tell that the individual who compiled these thought they were smarter than the high school students, when in reality, they called the following statements "analogies", which is not entirely untrue, but "metaphors" would have been a better choice.

It makes you wonder how much they paid attention in their high school English classes.

You are no doubt dumbstruck by the literary prowess of alleged high school students.  I find the ninth one there to be quite meaningful, for example.

(Actually, I love it.  It's hilariously demonstrative of her lack of vocabulary.  My love for number nine is not sarcastic.)

This reminds me of one of my favorite metaphors, from The Red Badge of Courage.  It goes something like this:
"The red sun was pasted like a wafer in the sky."

I'm going completely from memory there, so it might not be verbatim, but I find it hilarious.  HILARIOUS.

So I guess the lesson here is that metaphors are either effective, or hilarious.
And if you're Mark Twain, then perhaps your metaphors are both.

occulto

Writing is nice because you can hide behind it.

Nobody knows if I am actually the one writing this right now.  Or if someone else is doing so under my name.

S.E. Hinton can write books and people will read them, thinking that the author is a man and knows what's going on with gangs and brothers.  George Eliot can actually get books published, because people won't guess that the fine literature they're reading was actually written by (heaven forbid) a woman.

Really, the only people who are almost expected to have an alias are superheroes and authors:

Mark Twain.
Lemony Snicket.
Bruce Wayne.
Lewis Carroll.
Dr. Seuss.
George Orwell.
Voltaire.

Do writers have something to hide?  Must they create a chasm between themselves and their writing?

It's a very nice thing, hiding.