PRECEPT II.In prose, avoid a poetic collocation of words.

For weeks he had struggled with words that apparently were made up of fortuitous collocations of letters.

Owing to an unpremeditatedly funny collocation of title and author, the lettering read as follows:"Who am I?

But it is to be remembered, that the mere collocation of words in a sentence never affects the method of parsing them: on the contrary, the same words, however placed, are always to be parsed in precisely the same way, so long as they express precisely the same meaning.

They have not the relation which we sometimes find even in a random collocation, as in the accidental pictures of a discolored wall; for the careful hand of the contriver is traced through all this disorder; nay, the very execution, the conventional dash of pencil, betrays what a lawyer would call the malice prepense of the Artist in their strange disfigurement.

A happy phrase, an unexpected collocation of words, a habitual precision in the choice of terms, are rare and shining ornaments of conversation, but they do not for an instant supply the place of lively and interesting matter, and an excessive care for them is apt to tell unfavourably on the substance of discourse.

Why this curious collocation of onions and pigs?

Poetic diction abounds in bold figures of speech, and unusual collocations of words.