Uncommon collocations: Mordor as maudlin nostalgia, impotent anger and reverse lasso | New Forward

Uncommon collocations are combinations created by language users in accordance with the same patterns as ordinary collocations. When constructing such new units, a person intuitively feels the inner form of each word, their grammatical and phonetic compatibility. At the same time, there is often a figurative reinterpretation of the elements that make up such a phrase. The very term ’uncommon collocation’ itself is already an uncommon collocation, almost an oxymoron, because a collocation is something new, which, having once appeared in the language, gradually became common. Needless to say, when using uncommon collocations, as well as in the case of idioms, you need to know the measure. Otherwise, your speech will be unnatural, excessive and unnecessarily exalted. Provided that you systematically learn to use collocations, believe me, your utterance will be given a real coherence, fluency, even artistic eloquence, which is going to be useful to you both in personal communication and public performa