"What most writers need," said long-time New Yorker journalist Lillian Ross, "is not another writer but an editor--someone to talk to about their work, someone capable of giving guidance and help without getting in the writers' way."

If you're lucky, you may have the opportunity to be guided by a professional editor--that is, an experienced wordsmith who communicates with writers honestly and patiently to help them do their best work. Most of us, however, have to recruit our editors from among the ranks of good-hearted amateurs--colleagues, teachers, family members.

Regardless of our editor's experience and professional status, knowing how to work with her and not against her is one of the most valuable lessons an aspiring writer can learn. In his article "Let Us Now Praise Editors" (Salon.com, July 24, 2007), Gary Kamiya says that learning how to be edited is just as important as learning how to edit. It "teaches you a lot about writing," he says, "about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself."

Kamiya's experience as both a writer and an editor has taught him that both jobs are demanding, sometimes exasperating, but in different ways. In a particularly memorable passage, he compares "the exchange between writer and editor" to the "process of growing up":

The act of writing is godlike, omnipotent, infantile. Your piece is a statement delivered from on high, a pronouncement ex cathedra, as egotistical and unchecked as the wail of a baby. Then it goes out into the world, to an editor, and the reality principle rears its ugly head. You are forced as a writer to come to terms with the gap between your idea and your execution--and still more deflating, between your idea and what your idea should have been.

This isn't easy. You have to let go of your attachment to the specific words you've written and open yourself to what you were aiming for. You need enough confidence in yourself to accept constructive criticism, some of which can feel like your internal organs are being more or less gently moved around. More than just about any other non-artistic activity--therapy and, yes, sex are possible exceptions--being edited forces you to see yourself, or at least what you've written, the way others see you. It is a depersonalizing process in some ways, yet having to stand outside yourself deepens you as a person. You need to grow a thick skin in order to have a thinner, more sensitive one.

In a similar spirit, biographer Charles J. Shields says, "You can’t be thin-skinned when a wiser, more experienced writer or editor shows you how to make a sentence stronger, or how to cut the fat from a page."

For Shields, the notion of growing up with an editor is more than a figure of speech. As he tells us in "The Editor of the Breakfast Table," his first editor was his own father, a journalist who wanted him to learn how "to accept being edited . . . because everyone who succeeds as a writer gets edited."

Both Kamiya and Shields remind us that a demanding yet sympathetic editor (teacher, colleague, parent, or professional) deserves our gratitude. Shields says, "Someone taking the time to give you the benefit of their expertise isn’t (as I thought my father was doing) finding fault with you, or proving that you’re not a good writer. It’s a rite of passage into the profession. Be glad--you’re on your way."

In Kamiya's words, "Someone is noticing. Someone is reading. Someone cares."

More About Editing:

• "The Editor of the Breakfast Table," by Charles J. Shields
• Lillian Ross on Helpful Editors
• Wolcott Gibbs's Theory and Practice of Editing

With final exams approaching, a little exercise may be in order. Here at About Grammar & Composition, tucked away among the ads (also known as "sponsored links" and "offers"), you'll eventually find several review exercises and quizzes on a variety of topics. Here are some of our more popular pages:

• Subject-Verb Agreement
• Commonly Confused Figures of Speech
• Proofreading for Errors in Verb Tense
• Punctuating Sentences Correctly
• Commonly Confused Words
• Spelling Review Exercise

And here's a tip for instructors who would like to share these exercises with their students--or for anyone who would like to cut through the site's promotional clutter. Near the top of almost every page on About Grammar & Composition, you'll see a small printer icon with the message "Print" or "Print this Page." If you click on it, a fresh version of the exercise or quiz should appear--one that contains no ads, sponsored links, or offers.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could eliminate all of life's distractions so simply?

If you're reading this page, it's a safe bet that you know English grammar. That is, you know how to put words together in a sensible order and add the right endings. Whether or not you've ever opened a grammar book, you know how to produce combinations of sounds and of letters that others can understand. After all, English was used for a thousand years before the first grammar books ever appeared.

But how much do you know about grammar? And, really, why should anybody bother to learn about grammar at all?

Knowing about grammar, says David Crystal in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge University Press, 2003), means "being able to talk about what it is we are able to do when we construct sentences--to describe what the rules are, and what happens when they fail to apply."

In the Cambridge Encyclopedia (one of our Top 10 Reference Works for Writers and Editors), Crystal spends several hundred pages examining all aspects of the English language, including its history and vocabulary, regional and social variations, and the differences between spoken and written English.

But it's the chapters on English grammar that are central to his book, just as grammar itself is central to any study of language. Crystal opens his chapter on "Grammar Mythology" with a list of six reasons to study grammar--reasons perhaps worth pausing to think about.

• Accepting the Challenge
  "Because It's There." People are constantly curious about the world in which they live, and wish to understand it and (as with mountains) master it. Grammar is no different from any other domain of knowledge in this respect.



• Being Human
  But more than mountains, language is involved with almost everything we do as human beings. We cannot live without language. To understand the linguistic dimension of our existence would be no mean achievement. And grammar is the fundamental organizing principle of language.



• Exploring Our Creative Ability
  Our grammatical ability is extraordinary. It is probably the most creative ability we have. There is no limit to what we can say or write, yet all of this potential is controlled by a finite number of rules. How is this done?



• Solving Problems
  Nonetheless, our language can let us down. We encounter ambiguity, and unintelligible speech or writing. To deal with these problems, we need to put grammar under the microscope, and work out what went wrong. This is especially critical when children are learning to emulate the standards used by educated adult members of their community.



• Learning Other Languages
  Learning about English grammar provides a basis for learning other languages. Much of the apparatus we need to study English turns out to be of general usefulness. Other languages have clauses, tenses, and adjectives too. And the differences they display will be all the clearer if we have first grasped what is unique to our mother tongue.



• Increasing Our Awareness
  After studying grammar, we should be more alert to the strength, flexibility, and variety of our language, and thus be in a better position to use it and to evaluate others' use of it. Whether our own usage in fact improves, as a result, is less predictable. Our awareness must improve, but turning that awareness into better practice--by speaking and writing more effectively--requires an additional set of skills. Even after a course on car mechanics, we can still drive carelessly.

Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, "Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language." If that sounds a bit too lofty, we might return to the simpler words of William Langland in his 14th century poem The Vision of Piers Plowman: "Grammer, the ground of al."

More About Grammar:

• What Is Grammar?
• Why Does Grammar Matter?
• Top 24 Grammatical Terms That We Should Have Learned in School

Image: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, second edition, by David Crystal (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

Some refer to it as gobbledygook. Others call it gibberish, drivel, claptrap, nonsense, or mumbo jumbo. Almost a century ago, in his lecture series On the Art of Writing (reprinted by Dover in 2006), Arthur Quiller-Couch called it "sham prose"--or jargon.

"Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst," the British author said to his Cambridge University students in 1913. "It is becoming the language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being."

And this pompous and hollow language is still the enemy of good clear prose. The two main vices of jargon, said Quiller-Couch, are "that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech" and "that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones." Fortunately, in lecture five of what he called his "course in First Aid to writing," he offered a few "rough rules" for combating jargon.

Worst Offenders
The first is:—Whenever in your reading you come across one of these words, case, instance, character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree—whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another of them—pull yourself up and take thought. . . . We may not be capable of much; but we can all write better than that, if we take a little trouble.

Woolly Words
Next, having trained yourself to keep a look-out for these worst offenders (and you will be surprised to find how quickly you get into the way of it), proceed to push your suspicions out among the whole cloudy host of abstract terms. "How excellent a thing is sleep," sighed Sancho Panza; "it wraps a man round like a cloak"—an excellent example, by the way, of how to say a thing concretely: a Jargoneer would have said that "among the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for withdrawing the human consciousness from the contemplation of immediate circumstances may perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable." How vile a thing—shall we say?—is the abstract noun! It wraps a man’s thoughts round like cotton wool. . . .

Elegant Variation
Let us turn to another trick of Jargon: the trick of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the Sporting Press that there, without needing to attend these lectures, the Undergraduate detects it for laughter:—

Haywords and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling; which apparently had no terrors for the Surrey crack. The old Oxonian, however, took some time in settling to work. . . .

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But why do you practise it in your Essays? An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Bryon shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the second sentence turns into "that great but unequal poet" and thenceforward I have as much trouble with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half-way down the page he becomes "the gloomy master of Newstead": overleaf he is reincarnated into "the meteoric darling of society": and so proceeds through successive avatars—"this arch-rebel,’ ‘the author of Childe Harold," "the apostle of scorn," "the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot," "the martyr of Missolonghi," "the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart." Now this again is Jargon. It does not, as most Jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes of timidity, which is worse. In literature as in life he makes himself felt who not only calls a spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades and re-double. . . .

Dodges of Jargon
For another rule—just as rough and ready, but just as useful: Train your suspicions to bristle up whenever you come upon "as regards," "with regard to," "in respect of," "in connection with," "according as to whether," and the like. They are all dodges of Jargon, circumlocutions for evading this or that simple statement: and I say that it is not enough to avoid them nine times out of ten, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred. You should never use them. That is positive enough, I hope? . . .

"To Be . . . or the Contrary?"
But let us close our florilegium and attempt to illustrate Jargon by the converse method of taking a famous piece of English (say Hamlet’s soliloquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this fashion:—

To be, or the contrary? Whether the former or the latter be preferable would seem to admit of some difference of opinion; the answer in the present case being of an affirmative or of a negative character according as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is similar to, if not indistinguishable from, that of death; and with the addition of finality the former might be considered identical with the latter: so that in this connection it might be argued with regard to sleep that, could the addition be effected, a termination would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of inconveniences, not to mention a number of downright evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying nature.

That is Jargon: and to write Jargon is to be perpetually shuffling around in the fog and cotton-wool of abstract terms; to be for ever hearkening, like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of a masculine style, is its use of the active verb and the concrete noun. When you write in the active voice, "They gave him a silver teapot," you write as a man. When you write "He was made the recipient of a silver teapot," you write jargon. But at the beginning set even higher store on the concrete noun.

For further instruction in first aid for writers, visit "Murder Your Darlings": Quiller-Couch on Style.

More Advice for Writers:

• Advice From One Writer to Another
• Kurt Vonnegut on Writing with Style
• Joyce Carol Oates: "Don't Give Up"
• Top Five Tips to Cut the Clutter

This month's roundup of facts, figures, and wild hunches is based on a study, released on April 24, of the effects of electronic communications on the writing habits of teenagers. Conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in partnership with the College Board’s National Commission on Writing, the study is based on a recent survey of 700 "nationally representative children," ages 12 to 17, and their parents. Here are the statistical highlights.

• Percentage of teens ages 12-17 who engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication (text messaging, sending email or instant messages, posting comments in social networking sites): 85



• Teens who do not think of these electronic texts as "writing": 60%



• Teens who say that they sometimes use informal writing styles instead of proper capitalization and punctuation in their school assignments: 50%



• Parents of teens who feel that there is a greater need to write well today than there was 20 years ago: 83%



• Teens who believe that good writing is important to success in life: 86%



• Teens who say that their school work requires writing either "every day" or "several times a week": 85%



• Teens who report that their typical school writing assignment is a paragraph to one page in length: 82%



• Teens who feel that additional in-class writing time would improve their writing abilities: 82%



• Teens who say that their internet-based writing of materials such as emails and instant messages has helped improve their overall writing: 15%



• Teens who say that this kind of writing makes no difference to their school writing: 73%

You'll find the full report at the website of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Do you think any of the survey's findings reveal anything that we didn't already know? Please share your thoughts by clicking on the comments button below. And please visit our Grammar & Composition Forum for past editions of Language Facts & Figures.

"Words that are horrible to one writer may not be horrible to another," says John Grimond in The Economist Style Guide (Profile Books, 2005). "But if you are a writer for whom no words are horrible, you would do well to take up some other activity."

You know the kinds of words he means. Not "bad" or insensitive or politically incorrect words, but those that are thoughtlessly used, abused, and overused. Words that may sound fresh at breakfast but by supper time have gone stale.

Included on my list of horrible words are absolutely (as a synonym for yes) and transparent (in its trendy managerial sense). Also the verb reinvent, the interjection whatever, and the noun parameter (when used by anyone except a mathematician).

As Grimond says, "No words or phrases should be banned outright from appearing in print," but we should recognize that some words are likely to annoy at least some of our readers some of the time. Though intended for a British audience, Grimond's list may include a horrible word or two of your own:

• carer (and most caring expressions)
• chattering classes
• facilitate
• famously
• governance
• grow the business
• guesstimate
• informed (as in his love of language informed his memos)
• likely (meaning probably, rather than probable)
• looking to (intending to)
• materiel
• ongoing
• poster child
• prestigious
• proactive
• rack up (profits, etc.)
• savvy
• segue
• source (meaning obtain)
• stakeholder

By clicking on the comments button below, tell us which horrible words appear on your list.

Advice About Writing:

• Ten Quick Tips to Improve Your Writing
• Seven Secrets to Success in English 101
• Six Resolutions for Writers Who Want to Be Read

When the Fairy Godmother casts her spell in Disney's Cinderella (1950), she sings:

It will do magic,
Believe it or not,
Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
Now "Salagadoola" means
"A-Menchika-boola-roo,"
But the thingamabob
That does the job
Is "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo."

Forget "Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo." Our magical word of the day is "thingamabob"--a Swiss Army knife of a word that means, well, just about anything we want it to mean. Not very helpfully, The American Heritage Dictionary defines "thingamabob" as (no joke) a "thingamajig."

Some call the "thingamabob" (or "thingamajig" or "whatchamacallit") a placeholder; others prefer the term tongue-tipper. Regardless of the label, it's a word used by speakers to signal that they don't know or can't remember a more precise word for the thingie--whatever it may be.

Some placeholders, such as "doodad" and "whatsit," are widely known. Others carry a more regional flavor: "gubbins" is favored by the British, "yoke" by the Irish. And some of the most peculiar tongue-tippers fall into the mysterious realm of family slang.

Here, for your delectation, is a list of placeholders that we've collected over the years:

• dealie
• deelybob
• dingus
• doodad
• doohickey
• doojigger
• gadget
• geegaw or gewgaw
• gismo or gizmo
• gubbins
• hoozywhat
• junk
• stuff
• thing
• thingamajig
• thingamambob
• thingie
• whatchamacallem
• whatchamacallit
• whatchamajigger
• whatsit
• whatsitsname
• whatnot
• whosis or whosit
• yoke

If you're familiar with a placeholder that's not on the list, please send along the whatchamajigger by clicking on the "comments" button below.

More Words About Words:

• The Language of Baseball
• Homer Simpson's Figures of Speech
• Glossary of Commonly Confused Words

What was the first language? How did language begin--and where and when?

Until recently, a sensible linguist would likely respond to such questions with a shrug and a sigh. (Many still do.) As Bernard Campbell states flatly in Humankind Emerging (Allyn & Bacon, 2005), "We simply do not know, and never will, how or when language began."

It's hard to imagine a cultural phenomenon that's more important than the development of language. And yet no human attribute offers less conclusive evidence regarding its origins. The mystery, says Christine Kenneally in her new book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Viking, 2007), lies in the nature of the spoken word:

For all its power to wound and seduce, speech is our most ephemeral creation; it is little more than air. It exists the body as a series of puffs and dissipates quickly into the atmosphere. . . . There are no verbs preserved in amber, no ossified nouns, and no prehistorical shrieks forever spread-eagled in the lava that took them by surprise.

The absence of such evidence certainly hasn't discouraged speculation about the origins of language. Over the centuries, many theories have been put forward--and just about all of them have been challenged, discounted, and often ridiculed. Each theory accounts for only a small part of what we know about language.

Here, identified by their disparaging nicknames, are some of the oldest and most common theories of how language began.

• The Bow-Wow Theory
  According to this theory, language began when our ancestors started imitating the natural sounds around them. The first speech was onomatopoeic--marked by echoic words such as moo, meow, splash, cuckoo, and bang.
  
  What's wrong with this theory?
  Relatively few words are onomatopoeic, and these words vary from one language to another. A dog's bark, for instance, is heard as au au in Brazil, ham ham in Albania, and wang, wang in China. In addition, many onomatopoeic words are of recent origin, and not all are derived from natural sounds.



• The Ding-Dong Theory
  This theory, favored by Plato and Pythagoras, maintains that speech arose in response to the essential qualities of objects in the environment. The original sounds people made were supposedly in harmony with the world around them.
  
  What's wrong with this theory?
  Apart from some rare instances of sound symbolism, there's no persuasive evidence, in any language, of an innate connection between sound and meaning.



• The La-La Theory
  The Danish linguist Otto Jespersen suggested that language may have developed from sounds associated with love, play, and--especially--song.
  
  What's wrong with this theory?
  As David Crystal notes in How Language Works (Penguin, 2005), this theory still fails to account for "the gap between the emotional and the rational aspects of speech expression."



• The Pooh-Pooh Theory
  This theory holds that speech began with interjections--spontaneous cries of pain ("Ouch!"), surprise ("Oh!"), and other emotions ("Yabba dabba do!").
  
  What's wrong with this theory?
  No language contains very many interjections, and, Crystal points out, "the clicks, intakes of breath, and other noises which are used in this way bear little relationship to the vowels and consonants found in phonology."



• The Yo-He-Ho Theory
  According to this theory, language evolved from the grunts, groans, and snorts evoked by heavy physical labor.
  
  What's wrong with this theory?
  Though this notion may account for some of the rhythmic features of language, it doesn't go very far in explaining where words come from.

As Peter Farb says in Word Play: What Happens When People Talk (Vintage, 1993), "All these speculations have serious flaws, and none can withstand the close scrutiny of present knowledge about the structure of language and about the evolution of our species."

But does this mean that all questions about the origin of language are unanswerable? Not necessarily. Over the past 20 years, scholars from such diverse fields as genetics, anthropology, and cognitive science have been engaged, as Kenneally says, in "a cross-discipline, multidimensional treasure hunt" to find out how language began. It is, she says, "the hardest problem in science today."

In a future article, we'll consider more recent theories about the origins and development of language--what William James called "the most imperfect and expensive means yet discovered for communicating thought."

More About Language:

• Key Dates in the History of the English Language
• Introduction to Etymology: Word Histories
• Six Common Myths About Language

"Read, read, read," was novelist William Faulkner's advice to young writers. "Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it."

Though some might question the merits of absorbing "trash," what's indisputable is Faulkner's injunction to read voraciously--to learn the craft of writing by studying how professional writers "do it." The one bit of advice we might add is to read the old as well as the new. Old writers (and yes, even dead writers) can teach us some new tricks.

With this thought in mind, we've collected 50 classic essays and speeches from such well-known British and American writers as Jonathan Swift, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Orwell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Robert Benchley. Each is a "classic" in the sense that the writer's words live on both for what they have to say and for the way they say it. Here are just a few of the enduring essays in our collection:

• "Advice on the Choice of a Mistress," by Benjamin Franklin
  This Founding Father advises an acquaintance, "But if you will not take this counsel and persist in thinking a commerce with the sex inevitable, then I repeat my former advice, that in all your amours you should prefer old women to young ones."


• "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," by Zora Neale Hurston
  "Sometimes, I feel discriminated against," Hurston writes, "but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me."


• "Two Ways of Seeing a River," by Mark Twain
  In an excerpt from his memoir about growing up alongside the Mississippi River, Mark Twain considers what may be lost as well as gained through knowledge and experience.


• "Street Haunting: A London Adventure," by Virginia Woolf
  In this essay by English novelist Virginia Woolf, the quest to buy a pencil serves as an occasion to contrast "street sauntering," with its sense of carefree wandering, with "street haunting," which hints at the more disturbing aspects of walking in the city.


• "The Penalty of Death," by H.L. Mencken
  Consider how (and why) Mencken injects humor into his discussion of a grim subject.

Read, read, read these classic essays--and then, as Faulkner also advises, "write. If it is good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window."

Image: William Faulkner (1897-1962)

If you put any trust in proverbs, you already know that time heals, steals, and flies. And you're equally aware that time is something we all make and take, keep and save, spend, waste, and lose. Habitually, almost without thinking, we explain our relationship to time through metaphors--lots of different metaphors.

In More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press, 1989), George Lakoff and Mark Turner remind us that "Metaphor isn't just for poets; it's in ordinary language and is the principal way we have of conceptualizing abstract concepts like life, death, and time." So whether we're spending it or running out of it, we deal with time (and time deals with us) metaphorically.

Here, if you have the time to spare, are a dozen timely metaphors.

• Time Is a Circus
  Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.
  (Ben Hecht)


• Time Is a Thief
  Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
  Time is the thief you cannot banish.
  These are my daughters, I suppose.
  But where in the world did the children vanish?
  (Phyllis McGinley, "Ballad of Lost Objects")


• Time Is a Trap
  But that's where I am, there's no escaping it. Time's a trap, I'm caught in it.
  (Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale)


• Time Is a Reef
  Time is the reef upon which all our frail mystic ships are wrecked.
  (Noel Coward, Blithe Spirit)


• Time Is a Storm
  Time is a storm in which we are all lost.
  (William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays)


• Time Is a Stream
  Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains.
  (Henry David Thoreau, Walden)


• Time Is a River
  Time is a flowing river. Happy those who allow themselves to be carried, unresisting, with the current. They float through easy days. They live, unquestioning, in the moment.
  (Christopher Morley, Where the Blue Begins)


• Time Is a Ruined Bridge
  And Time the ruined bridge has swept
  Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
  (Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn")


• Time Is the School and the Fire
  What am I now that I was then?
  May memory restore again and again
  The smallest color of the smallest day:
  Time is the school in which we learn,
  Time is the fire in which we burn.
  (Delmore Schwartz, "Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day")


• Time Is a Prison
  Initially, I was unaware that time, so boundless at first blush, was a prison.
  (Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory)


• Time Is an Arrow
  Time is an irreversible arrow, and we can never return to the self that we sloughed off in childhood or adolescence. The man trying to wear youth's carefree clothing, the woman costuming her emotions in doll's dresses--these are pathetic figures who want to reverse time's arrow.
  (Joshua Loth Liebman, "Renunciation of Immaturity," Peace of Mind)


• Time Is a Teacher
  Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils.
  (Hector Berlioz)

Time is indeed a "versatile performer," as Franklin P. Jones once observed. "It flies, marches on, heals all wounds, runs out, and will tell."

More About Metaphors:

• What Is a Metaphor?
• Using Similes and Metaphors to Enrich Our Writing
• House Calls: The Metaphors of Dr. Gregory House
• Susan Orlean's Extended Metaphor: "Super-Duper"