@spendius,
Quote:It's an interesting point. The difference between an appetite and a desire. They are almost identical but usage generally favours appetite for bodily needs and desire for psychological habits which have, often, an insatiable aspect. One is born with appetites and learns desires.
I would anyway unless I was being careless. That is why revision and proof reading are necessary.
And/or prescriptive. Ha, ha, ha....
No seriously - I think I've always been intuitively anti-prescriptive in language - but I didn't know that's what I was until JTT put a name on it.
I LIKE the image of greed as an appetite and the physicality of the images of slaking or sating that urge better than I do the more 'correct' or prescriptive images of mollifying a desire.
I think NOT adhering to those very specific and narrow differentials is what makes a writer a more creative writer.
For instance, Mrs. Tan today asked why it is incorrect and not even acceptable idiomatically to say , 'A person's life is shining with opportunities'.
MA very correctly said that most people would say, 'a person's life is 'filled' with or 'fraught' with or 'full' of opportunities.
My first thought was, 'Hmmm, fraught with opportunities?' That seems a little counterintuitive. But then I thought - that's an interesting way to look at it or express it - as in, there are so many opportunities that it becomes a burden to choose.
And I have to say that of the four choices offered - I loved, 'A person's life is shining with opportunities' the most. I think it should become an accepted idiom- it's the most richly descriptive.
So maybe it's not lack of proofreading - maybe it's a personal preference and a conscious choice.
Slake and sate used with the concept of greed as an appetite give the sentence a muscularity and physicality that I find more interesting than soothing or mollifying the emotional.
Besides, I think slake is a great word - and you rarely ever hear it anymore.
