Definition:
A generally pejorative term for writing or speech that is characterized by ornate, flowery, or hyperbolic language. Contrast with plain style.
See also:
- Bomphiologia
- Cacozelia
- Eloquence
- Gongorism
- Grand Style
- Overwriting
- Prose
- Samuel Johnson on the Bugbear Style
- Skotison
- Tall Talk
- Verbosity
Examples and Observations:
- "Certain producers of plain prose have conned the reading public into believing that only in prose plain, humdrum or flat can you articulate the mind of inarticulate ordinary Joe. Even to begin to do that you need to be more articulate than Joe, or you might as well tape-record him and leave it at that. This minimalist vogue depends on the premise that only an almost invisible style can be sincere, honest, moving, sensitive and so forth, whereas prose that draws attention to itself by being revved up, ample, intense, incandescent or flamboyant turns its back on something almost holy--the human bond with ordinariness. . . .
"It takes a certain amount of sass to speak up for prose that's rich, succulent and full of novelty. Purple is immoral, undemocratic and insincere; at best artsy, at worst the exterminating angel of depravity. So long as originality and lexical precision prevail, the sentient writer has a right to immerse himself or herself in phenomena and come up with as personal a version as can be. A writer who can't do purple is missing a trick. A writer who does purple all the time ought to have more tricks."
(Paul West, "In Defense of Purple Prose." The New York Times, Dec. 15, 1985) - "Outside pockets of euphoria in Burnley, Hull and Sunderland, fans have been wallowing in liquor-soaked self-pity as the chill hand of failure gripped them by the neck and flung them mercilessly onto the scrapheap of broken dreams. (Please forgive my purple prose here: as a red of the Stretford variety I am perhaps inappropriately using this week's digest as catharsis, but I'll move on, I promise.)"
(Mark Smith, "The Northerner: United in Grief." The Guardian, May 28, 2009) - "The idiom was originally a purple passage or purple patch, and the earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1598. The rhetorical sense in English comes from the Ars Poetica of Horace, specifically from the phrase purpureus pannus, a purple garment or raiment, the color purple symbolizing royalty, grandeur, power.
"Purple prose doesn't seem to have become wholly pejorative until the twentieth century, when steep declines in the vocabulary and reading comprehension of college-educated Americans caused a panic in the education establishment and the newspaper industry, which together launched a campaign against prose that displayed royalty, grandeur, and power. This led to the disappearance of the semicolon, the invention of the sentence fragment, and a marked increase in the use of words like methodological."
(Charles Harrington Elster, What in the Word? Harcourt, 2005)
