That’s how Dickens wanted to get his image across, the reader is simply bludgeoned into submission.
The glorious insanities of the English language mean that you can do all sorts of odd and demeaning things to a book. You can cook it.
Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It’s the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.
Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.
If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn’t true.
But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents. Lawyers are like Cole Porter and Alfred Lord Tennyson with a blender. A lawyer, for a reason or reasons known only to him or herself, cannot see a whole without dividing it into its parts and enumerating them in immense detail. This may be something to do with the billing system.
That the West thinks that seven is lucky and the Chinese think eight is shows both that numerology is wrong and that it’s popular across the world. Numbers feel mysterious and significant. So all you need to do to sound mysterious and significant is to pick a number, any number.
It’s sad to see Time’s toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.
Who needs sense when you have alliteration?
The chief recommendation of Johnson’s is that he defines a cough as: “A convulsion of the lungs, vellicated by some sharp serosity.” Dictionaries.
This leads to the great theory of human history: that we didn’t start farming because we wanted food – there was loads of that around. We started farming because we wanted booze.
They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things – they’re lonely people – they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts – they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.
To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.
The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity. That’s why they’re traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That’s also why they’re traffic policemen.
It’s a fifty-fifty chance that your main aim is to be thelyphthoric, a word that comes from the Greek thely meaning “woman” and phthoric meaning “corrupting,” thus the OED’s simple definition: “that corrupts or ruins women.
Despite what astronomers would have you believe, most of the stars were created not by energy cooling into matter, but by Zeus. Zeus.
The palindromeis anold tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, “Madam, I’m Adam.” And it has caused terrible distress to even the greatest literary minds.
Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads.
The ladies towards whom these young champions would be scampering were the camp followers, women of more enterprise than virtue, who would follow the soldiers around and rent their affections by the hour. Camp.
A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.