We were taught to avoid certain locutions when speaking. in the poet's somewhat affected locution, word order is often reversed and so we have “the sea serene”
Recent Examples on the WebIn diplomatic memorandums, officials avoided the term military base; the preferred locution was joint communications facility. Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic, 15 June 2022 With its mess of divergent voices, picture-poems, and eccentric locutions, the result is baffling, beautiful, and always fascinatingly Notley. David Wallace, The New Yorker, 1 Apr. 2020 President Lyndon Baines Johnson was a retro Texan by birth and locution. Chris Jones, chicagotribune.com, 2 Oct. 2019 Consider common appeals to allyship and altruism; such locutions convey a sort of optional quality, a moralistic tone, and unreliable trendiness. Astra Taylor, The New Republic, 26 Aug. 2019 On this night, Dylan made every word count, and sang with a blues master’s locution. Greg Kot, chicagotribune.com, 31 Oct. 2019 American English is meant to grow wild and woolly on our shores, spawning dialects and pidgins, wantonly consuming foreign words and locutions, anarchically legitimizing slang and warped grammar. Virginia Heffernan, WIRED, 28 June 2018 This is an engrossing story, which Wood tells with a mastery of detail and a modern plainness of expression that makes a refreshing contrast with the 18th-century locutions of his subjects. Richard Brookhiser, New York Times, 31 Oct. 2017 Over the past decade a new, and very revealing, locution has drifted from our universities into the media mainstream: Speaking as an X…This is not an anodyne phrase. Mark Lilla, WSJ, 11 Aug. 2017 See More
Word History
Etymology
Middle English locucion, borrowed from Anglo-French, borrowed from Latin locūtiōn-, locūtiō "act or manner of speaking, phrase, expression," from locū-, variant stem of loquī "to speak, talk" + -tiōn-, -tiō, suffix of verbal action — more at eloquent