blazes devoured people and all their lives

[alpacinou]

Hello to all,

In context of writing about massive wildfires similar to the one in Australia, can I write a sentence like this?

Insatiable blazes/ flames devoured people and all their lives.

 

[Rover_KE]

That is completely unnatural.:-(

 

[alpacinou]

That is completely unnatural.:-(

Is it fixable? How would you put it?

 

[GoesStation]

Once you've said that people have been burned to death, there's little reason to mention that the flames consumed their lives.

I've been reading an English police mystery you might enjoy called Dangerous Davies by Leslie Thomas. The author uses vivid, colorful language containing a healthy portion of well-placed adjectives, beginning with the one in the title. (The detective, a notoriously clumsy bumbler, is nicknamed "Dangerous" because he isn't — except to his superiors' hopes for an arrest.)

I think it's an excellent example of the kind of colorful writing that attracts you.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

Is it fixable? How would you put it?

It's just redundant. It's like saying the fires killed people and made them dead.

So either say people or lives. It becomes nonesense if you say both.

 

[alpacinou]

It's just redundant. It's like saying the fires killed people and made them dead.

So either say people or lives. It becomes nonesense if you say both.

I see. I thought the whole thing was bad! What about this?

The insatiable blaze devoured vast swathes of the jungle.

 

[emsr2d2]

What about this?

The insatiable blaze devoured vast swathes of the jungle.

That's OK.

 

[alpacinou]

That's OK.

When I started the thread, my focus was more on "insatiable flames / blaze than the second part. I think I should have made that clear.

Could I also say "flames" or "blazes" instead of singular blaze?

 

[emsr2d2]

Yes to "flames" but you can only say "blazes" if more than one individual fire was burning.

 

[Charlie Bernstein]

I see. I thought the whole thing was bad! What about this?

The insatiable blaze devoured vast swathes of the jungle.

Personally, I'd say "vast swaths." In American English, a swathe is not a swath.