I am indebted to Justin Isis for sending me photographs of sample pages from Kingsley Amis's The King's English , two of which I hope I can inset below. Together they should provide us with one entry from Amis's book. The entry in question is on the words 'infamous' and 'infamy'. These photographs were sent on the 30th of January 2022. It is the 4th of February 2022 as I write this. It just so happened that earlier today, I came across an example of the usage of which Amis complains. The book in which it appears is A Priori by Edwin Mares, a work on epistemology. The sentence is as follows: "As we saw in [Section] 3.6, Descartes also, infamously, holds that we have an innate idea of God, which he uses to prove that his ideas about the world are accurate." In case it is hard to read in the inset pictures, here is what Amis writes: "Both adjective and noun ['infamous' and 'infamy'] used to be terms of extreme moral disappro...
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. I wonder if you will recognise this. It is the opening sentence of the novel Paul Clifford , by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. I have just seen Bulwer-Lytton's name brought up, and the above sentence quoted, in response to the question, "Who have been the world's worst published writers?" I have not read more of Bulwer-Lytton than a few quotes such as that above, but I cannot think he really deserves to be numbered among 'the world's worst published writers'. Tellingly, the person who quoted the above did not give any reason why we are supposed to consider this such bad writing, apart from mentioning that the opening phrase is a cliché...
I've just read a little of this article in the Times Literary Supplement , written by one of the cultural scions of Messrs Strunk and White: Plain Speaking - How to Write Well I do have some sympathy with writing plainly and maximising the virtues of the demotic Anglo-Saxon (in a way that I have not done in this sentence), but I can't help thinking there's a pathology posing as common sense in a lot of this hand-wringing about simplicity. For instance, from the opening paragraph: "Our teacher is a seasoned journalist who insists that we learn how to edit our own prose ruthlessly. (If he saw this paragraph, he would cut 'seasoned' – a cliché – as well as all the words ending with -ly.)" She goes on to say that her teacher would eschew not only obvious jargon, but anything "long and Latinate". Is this not a kind of stylistic hair shirt, the pursuing of rules for their own sake? Just take the first sentence of the article's first para...
Comments
Post a Comment