Ag-ing Poorly

♫ Silver bails. Silver bails. It’s amiss time in the city.

Ding-a-ling, here’s the thing: Soon it will be dismiss gray. ♫

Why did silver leave? If that shade has abandoned us, gray will surely follow.

Sliver, in the sentence pictured below, is anything but sterling. When you want to spell the metal whose symbol on the periodic table is Ag, no gray area exists; silver is the gold standard.

The sentence lacks what every cloud has. If silver were deposited in sliver’s place, the sentence would have a “silver lining,” which is something good that can be found in a bad situation. John Milton may have originated this phrase in his 1634 poem Comus, which included the following lines:

Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud

Turn forth her silver lining on the night?

A cloud, even one described as dark or gloomy, may have a hint of the shining sun behind it. This can give the cloud’s lining, or edge, a silvery complexion. A dark cloud reveals signs of brightness, just as dark times may hold a hopeful prospect.

In the spirit of silver linings, the writer should look on the bright side: At least he went with the anagram sliver instead of the anagram livers. Of course, silver, a hot commodity, would have been most useful in this instance. 

You may not care about this malaprop, but silver minds. (When it comes to silver, I am a mother lode of awful puns. I serve them on a platter. You know what kind of platter.)

Polish that sliver. All this struggling editor wants for Christmas is silver.

And gold. Lots and lots of gold.