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 B

By a long shot

Idiomatic Phrase
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

By a great margin or degree; used to emphasize the extent to which something exceeds or falls short of a measure.

Detailed Definition
Derived from marksmanship, where a long shot indicates great distance, this idiom signals magnitude—usually in comparative contexts. In poetry, it appears in hyperbolic or emphatic passages where a speaker insists on the scale of difference, love, loss, or achievement. Its vernacular energy makes it effective in conversational free verse, where the speaker asserts the unmistakable weight of feeling. Poets also invoke it ironically, undermining boasts or deflating pretension. The phrase's origins in precision—measuring how far a shot travels—give it an unexpected exactness that sits interestingly against its colloquial deployment, creating tension between precision and exaggeration that lyric poetry knows how to exploit.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem asserting the absolute singularity of love might use by a long shot to insist that this is unlike anything before it — not the best by a narrow margin, but by a long shot, the distance between categories rather than degrees; In satirical verse, by a long shot serves deflation — the speaker's achievement, so proudly celebrated, falling short by a long shot of the standard they imagined themselves to have met; The marksmanship origin of the phrase suits poems about precision, distance, and the measurement of effort against achievement — the long shot being the test of whether the aim was true; A poem about athletic competition might use by a long shot to honor the winner whose margin of victory made the result unambiguous — the gap between first and second not close but conclusive; In a love poem, by a long shot might describe the distance between what the speaker felt and what they managed to say — the words falling short of the feeling by a long shot, the inadequacy of language made visible; The phrase suits hyperbolic lyric where the speaker insists on the unmistakable scale of what they feel, refusing the modesty that would make the emotion merely comparative rather than categorically different
Additional Notes
This idiom stresses distance from success, truth, or comparison. In poetry, it can sound conversational, but it is useful for measuring emotional or moral gaps: “not peace, not by a long shot.” It may also intensify praise, as in “the bravest, by a long shot.” Related imagery includes marksmen, racecourses, horizons, and impossible reach.
Also Known As
By far Easily
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