A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter A

affected diction

Concept
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Poetic diction marked by artificiality, excessive ornamentation, or pretentious vocabulary that draws attention to style over substance.

Detailed Definition
Deliberately artificial, mannered, or excessively refined word choice that draws attention to its own artificiality. This can serve satirical purposes, create specific tonal effects, or establish distance from natural speech. Affected diction might involve archaic words, euphemisms, circumlocutions, or pompous vocabulary. Poets may use it ironically to mock pretension or sincerely to create formal distance and elevation. When successful, affected diction becomes a stylistic choice serving the poem's themes; when unsuccessful, it merely sounds pretentious.
Example
Example in poetry:
Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock” uses affected diction like “the long labors of the toilet stand” to mock aristocratic vanity; Oscar Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” employs elevated diction (“each man kills the thing he loves”) for tragic irony; Victorian poets often used Latinate diction (“verdant,” “effulgent”) to signal refinement; affected diction can signal class, irony, or artificiality; contemporary example: Billy Collins parodies affected diction in “Litany” (“You are the bread and the knife...”); it contrasts with plainspoken or vernacular styles.
Additional Notes
Affected diction uses artificially elevated, archaic, or ornate language that may feel insincere or outdated; students should distinguish intentional stylistic choice from poor craftsmanship.
Also Known As
Artificial diction Stilted speech Affected style Cacozelia
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