Meaning
Writing so ornate, overwrought or ostentatiously flowery that the decoration overwhelms the sense; a critical term of abuse for excessive metaphor, adjectives and rhetoric. A localized patch of such writing may instead be called a purple passage or purple patch. Formal-critical register; strongly pejorative, though occasionally reclaimed by stylists as a badge of exuberance. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The ultimate source is classical: Horace's Ars Poetica (about 18 BC) warns against purpureus pannus, a purple patch, a length of gaudy purple cloth sewn onto plainer material, as a metaphor for ornamental set pieces out of place in serious work. The prestige behind the colour was that of Tyrian purple, the costly shellfish dye of royal and imperial garments: Etymonline records English purple in the rhetorical sense of splendid or gaudy from the 1590s, typically of prose by the mid-eighteenth century, and purple for imperial or regal power by the 1550s. The English fixed phrases came much later. The OED-derived chain assembled by Grammarphobia dates purple patch to the early 1700s, purple passage to 1882, and purple prose itself to 1901, in the North Adams, Massachusetts Evening Transcript. The phrase is therefore a twentieth-century coinage built on a two-thousand-year-old metaphor, not a direct survival of Horace's Latin into English.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a touch of purple
- purple passage
- purple patch
Usage Examples
- The report described the flood as an aqueous symphony of devastation, purple prose that the subeditor replaced with two feet of water in the high street.
- She writes cleanly until a sunset appears, and then the purple passages bloom.
- Critics accused the novel's final chapter of purple prose, but readers underlined every sentence of it.