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.

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 C

Cost a pretty penny

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

To be very expensive; to require a substantial sum of money for purchase or acquisition.

Detailed Definition
This euphemistic idiom softens the bluntness of financial excess with the ironic modifier "pretty," suggesting that expense can be elegant or decorative. In poetry, it appears in works exploring class, desire, and the commodification of beauty and experience. Poets invoke it to examine the relationship between monetary and aesthetic value, asking what things are worth and who gets to afford them. It suits satirical verse mocking conspicuous consumption as well as elegies mourning the things—educations, healthcare, dignity—that poverty puts beyond reach. The juxtaposition of prettiness and cost creates a small lyric irony that poets can exploit to question the prices we pay for the beautiful things of life.
Example
Example in poetry:
A poem about access to education might observe that for many families, a university degree costs a pretty penny — the phrase's ironic elegance masking the genuine hardship that elegance describes; In a satirical poem about luxury consumption, the things that cost a pretty penny are enumerated with escalating irony — each item's prettiness inversely proportional to the neediness of its purchase; The idiom's softening of financial reality through the diminutive pretty allows a poet to explore how language is used to make prohibitive cost seem merely decorative rather than genuinely exclusionary; A poem about a beloved object purchased at great sacrifice might use cost a pretty penny affectionately — the cost remembered as evidence of the depth of feeling that overrode prudence; In an elegy for a working-class parent, the things they saved for — the coat, the occasion, the gift that cost a pretty penny — become sacred objects, each purchase a testament to love expressed in financial form; The phrase suits poems about the pricing of beauty itself — art, music, the view from the hill — asking whether the things that cost a pretty penny are worth the cost, and who gets to decide
Additional Notes
This phrase suggests considerable expense while retaining a slightly old-fashioned, conversational charm. In poetry, it can be used literally for luxury or ironically for emotional cost: pride, beauty, or freedom may “cost a pretty penny.” It pairs well with market imagery, coins, shop windows, dowries, theatre, and the idea that value is never purely financial.
Also Known As
Cost a fortune Cost an arm and a leg
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