“In a single fluid motion”
This is a phrase which I’ve encountered in several novels by different authors. I think it’s a good phrase, and in each case where I’ve seen it, it is an apt description of the action taking place. But I wonder how it is that so many different writers come to use it.
Are some writers deliberately stealing phrases from others? Is it even stealing, since it’s only five words? Are writers unconsciously influenced by what they read, so that they do not even realize when they are doing this? Do I do this, as well? Or is there a guide to approved phrases that I don’t know about?
A variation on this is “in one fluid motion.”
I think that phrase is a pretty standard cliche. I’ve read it before, or variations thereof.
I think we do absorb, not so much the words, but the style of the literature we read, and part of that style is the use of description.
Something like that is simple, and so easy to picture in our minds that it’s not intrusive. If the author spent time inventing a new way of describing the thing, would it really add anything to the narrative? I don’t think it would.
Some metaphors or descriptions pass into the language as a single unit after a while, I think, to the point that many readers no longer see the images they suggest. There’s a metaphor in here–comparing the motion to water–but I never think of that anymore when I see this phrase. They’re hard to resist and weed out because the eye skips over them, but I think it’s worth trying to get them out because overuse has drained them of the meaning they ought to have.
Maybe it comes from looking at and thinking about words too much. Something that is normally transparent jumped out at me, plain as day. And I ended up analyzing something that is supposed to pass as an unanalyzed unit.