Immigrants streamed into the land. - English example sentence

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halfb1t December 10, 2012 December 10, 2012 at 10:51:22 AM UTC

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Not English (by me).

Building an extended metaphor based on watercourses that includes streams of immigrants is perfectly reasonable; but this by itself is just odd. It has the ring of student work--about at the level of high-school sophomores, who have discovered they can create never-before-heard combinations of words, but whose complement of absorbed patterns is still short of mastery.

The world of English is far wider than my experience and contains many things I should reject out of hand as "not English" or "not natural." That's my bad.

I should accept:
Immigrants came in driblets, then streams, then rivers.
Immigrants came in driblets.
Immigrants came in rivers.
The last two make sense because they are extremes. "Streams" by itself is bad because it doesn't say what it means. Many or few? All that "stream" denotes is a certain, perhaps temporary, continuity.