Why Everyone "Sweats Profusely" in Novels

"Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess."

I was reaching the end of my fantasy manuscript’s six-thousandth draft. My leading man, a spoiled prince ill-equipped for anything more taxing than a pub crawl, was losing a fight. We were equally exhausted, him in a burning palace by the sea, me in the coffee shop across the road from my flat. Smoke was filling his lungs, burning his skin. His vision was fogging. His muscles ached. And, as characters often do, he began “sweating profusely”.

My cursor blinked after I typed that line. I stared at the screen. That phrase, “sweating profusely”, had materialised unbidden, as if typed by muscle memory. As if the two words had been lying in wait, crouched in my subconsciousness, ready to pounce. I don’t think I’ve ever said it before, but there it was.

Once I noticed it, I couldn’t un-notice it. Like a literary version of the red car syndrome, profuse sweating began to follow me through every book I read. Through armour, under tunics, beside fireplaces, on horseback, mid-foreplay, post-duel, during stressful political negotiations. Everyone in novels seems to be absolutely dripping.

By the fifth profuse sweat, I had to wonder: why this phrase? Why always this phrase? Why not sweating heavily or sweating copiously or sweating noticeably? No matter the novel, sweat seemed to always have the same adverb stuck to its hull like a barnacle.

The phenomenon I was mentally fumbling toward has a name: collocation. It refers to how certain words seem magnetically drawn together, like a young couple in the backseat of a bus. As British linguist J.R. Firth puts it, collocation is “the company that words keep”. The words that appear together, as a pair or group, more frequently than can be chalked up to chance.

It’s why “blood oath” sounds more natural than “blood promise”, or why “ancient magic” sounds better than “old magic”. We don’t destroy a house, we demolish it. We give thunderous applause and heartfelt apologies. We let out piercing screams when we see unspeakable evil before our grisly death. We grievously wound, laugh raucously, and sweat profusely.

Rarely does “profusely” stray from its soulmate. We don’t often see it outside sweating, bleeding, apologising and maybe thanking. As Gillian Flynn put it in Gone Girl: “Does anyone do anything profusely except apologize? Sweat, I guess.”

I went back to my scene. The idiot prince was fumbling to swing his sword. He couldn’t grip its handle as tight as he needed to because he was… sweating hard? Glistening? Shirt clinging to his back? Oozing like an overripe fig? Each revision felt awkward, trying too hard. The humble “sweating profusely” may be common but at least it didn’t squeak when it walked. It knew its role, did its job and let the story move on.

When words pair up nicely and are frequently used, they lodge into our mental lexicons. Once a collocation becomes embedded, we stop noticing it. It makes our speech sound natural instead of drawing attention to itself (“he perspired exorbitantly, exhibiting diaphoresis with leaking abandon”). Over time, these collocations become so familiar that the alternatives sound odd.

The poet and linguist John Sinclair argued that most of our language is patterned to the point of automation. Native speakers don’t string sentences together word by word, he says. They use chunks. We don’t sculpt each new sentence from raw clay; we snap Lego blocks together.

Should writers, who must reimagine whole worlds, also reimagine the language used to describe them? You could argue that some of the fun of many novels is the pairing of the new with the mundane. The knight may be riding a two-headed warbeast but he’s still breathing deeply, clenching his fists and yes, sweating profusely. It’s the same language you’d use to talk about a job interview in July. The body, at least, remains familiar.

I enjoy the phrase “sweating profusely”. It rolls off the tongue with a horrible, humid breath. There’s something so oozy about the word “profusely” that sounds exactly how sweat ought to behave.

In the end, it didn’t matter, at least not for my manuscript. The entire scene vanished with one clean highlight and a tap of the backspace key. It turns out the two words I spent the last few hours focusing on were the least of my concern and I needed to rework the entire climactic sequence. I’ll have a fantastic time writing the six-thousand-and-first draft of this novel and I’ll enjoy it…profusely.

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Further Reading

• Collocations and Idioms, Similarities and Differences by Muna Ibrahim Ahmed (X)

• Collocations vs. Cliches by Barbara Wallraff (X)

Thanks so much for reading! Sorry if you found this topic incredibly niche and boring, I will 100% be doing more of these, I am a very niche and boring person! Much love!