Category: Language Matters
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What’s in a Name?
Mike Gilleland's erudite disquisition on crappy names (craptronyms?) put me in mind of a chess opponent I once faced in a Las Vegas tournament. The fellow, a German, rejoiced under the name of David Assman. It would really have been a hoot had the tournament's venue been Fucking, Austria, near Salzburg. (If a major tournament…
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More Zinsser on Writing
William Zinsser, On Writing Well, 5th ed., Chapter 13: 1. "Use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around a passive verb." A good rule of thumb. 2. "Passive-voice writers," Zinsser tells us, "prefer long words of Latin origin to short Anglo-Saxon words — which compounds their trouble and makes their sentences…
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Zinsser on Writing
I found William Zinsser, On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction, 5th ed., in a discard bin a while back for a quarter. A nice find and a good read. His politics are leftish, are they not? But I won't hold that against him. From what I have read, his advice is good.…
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George Orwell on Good Writing
George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay all should read. As timely now as it was sixty two years ago, it is available in several anthologies and on-line here. Orwell lays down the following rules for good writing. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you…
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What is Language? Tool, Enabler, Dominatrix?
I have spoken before, romantically no doubt, of the mother tongue as our alma mater, our dear mother to whom we owe honor. Matrix of our thoughts, she is deeper and higher than our thoughts, their sacred Enabler. So I was pleased to come across a similar, albeit more trenchant, observation in Karl Kraus' Beim…