The Amber I know is the actress that starred in the Aquaman blockbuster. Not that I personally know her, of course. The other ambers I thought I knew were those red hot burning particles that come after a fire. When I wrote my short story “The Wizard and His Magic Flask”, I had used “ambers” whenever I wanted to describe the hot particles.
Thank goodness I did a search when I was looking for inspiration on how to phrase “ambers”. It took me quite a while to figure out what was wrong. My search did not return the “ambers” that I wanted. Then, I searched for “fire” in Thesaurus.com and voila! There it was. I had spelt the word wrongly. It should have been “embers”.
So… let’s clear things up:
According to Oxford Dictionary, “amber” is a yellowish hard translucent fossilised resin from extinct coniferous trees. If I’m not wrong, in the first Jurassic Park movie, researches discovered the mosquito with dinosaur DNA preserved in “amber”.
“Amber” is also a colour - honey yellow. It’s often described as the “ready to stop” yellow traffic light.
“Ember” on the other hand, is a small piece of burning or glowing coal or wood in a dying fire - precisely the one I wanted to describe in my story. I was lucky to have discovered my mistake before I posted the story otherwise it would prove embarrassing!
No comments:
Post a Comment