vivid figures of speech

I started listening to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea yesterday. Librivox has the F. P. Walter translation in its catalog. It's about 16 hours long.

"The philosopher Diderot has very aptly claimed that a man's bearing is the clue to his character, and this stocky little man was certainly a living proof of this claim. You could sense that his everyday conversation must have been packed with such vivid figures of speech as personification, symbolism, and misplaced modifiers. But I was never in a position to verify this because, around me, he used only an odd and utterly incomprehensible dialect" (somewhere in part I, chapter 8; emphasis mine).

Ah, I love that sentence.

Jules Verne

Apparently today is Jules Verne's 183rd birthday. I have to say that I wouldn't have known, if I hadn't seen the cool Verne-inspired interactive doodle on Google's homepage this morning. This PC Magazine article discusses the doodle. I have to admit that I spent some time finagling the controls in order to grab a screenshot that included the little hot air balloon (the above was the best I could do).

In any case, the doodle serves as a reminder that I've been wanting to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Some readers will know that I am a bit of an ichthyophobic, but I always enjoyed the 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride a Disneyland as a child and between Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Sarah Brightman's Dive album I've developed a fascination with Captain Nemo.