One of the most common pieces of advice you’ll get as a writer is not to write purple prose and it’s almost uniformly the thing editors will par away when confronted with in a manuscript. What is purple prose? From Wordsmith: “An overly ornate piece of writing. Two synonyms of the term are ‘purple passage’ and ‘purple patch’. The idea comes from Latin pannus purpureus (purple patch), a phrase used by the poet Horace in his Ars Poetica (The Art of Poetry) to suggest a patch of royal fabric on an ordinary cloth, a brilliant piece of writing in an overall dull work. Purple was the color of choice by the royalty as the purple dye was the rarest and hence most expensive.” The connotations in the origins of the term aren’t as negative as I expected. True, there is an imbalance suggested here, a lack of cohesion, and a measure of pretension; but there’s also a sense of reaching for the fantastic and unattainable, an exhibition of something rare and treasured.
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trust not the eye; make of your meat an imaging device 