[lit-ideas] Re: 1874 clarity
- From: Andy <mimi.erva@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 19 Nov 2011 09:55:11 -0800 (PST)
This is beautiful. I love the way he starts with c's and goes through the
alphabet to the v's. Prurient jocosity, I take it to mean bathroom humor.
Chaucer might have something to say about that. I wonder what the writer would
have thought of today's mostly unadorned style. I heard an interview a long
time ago with someone who wrote a book about how differently language had been
used in the 19th century. He illustrated his point with letters written by
ordinary people during the Civil War, and they were in fact beautifully
written. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is poetry. It is very beautiful.
I recently read The Snows of Kilimanjaro. For all its journalistic style, and
especially for how short it is, I thought it was quite emotional. Like the
Gettysburg Address, it's simple yet beautiful. I wonder that Hemingway has
been unfairly pigeonholed with his allegedly macho creed. The two things I
read so far have him writing about complex emotional issues, hardly black and
white grunt grunt macho junk. From what I read so far, the feminists are
wrong, or at least one dimensional. James Joyce apparently especially liked A
Clean Well Lighted Place. And Hemingway did it without being a modernist. I
have this vague idea that Virginia Woolf disliked Joyce's modernist work, even
though she herself was one.
Andy
________________________________
From: Julie Krueger <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Saturday, November 19, 2011 9:56 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] 1874 clarity
From this week's World Wide Words:
<<The earliest unearthed so far is in The Pennsylvania School Journal
of 1874. It is surely older still. This version is from early in its
life:
Let your conversation possess a clarified conciseness,
compacted comprehensibleness, coalescent consistency, and
a concatenated cogency. Eschew all conglomerations of
flatulent garrulity, jejune babblement, and asinine
affectations. Let your extemporaneous descantings and
unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility, without
rhodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously avoid all
polysyllabical profundity, pompous prolixity, and
ventriloquial vapidity. Shun double-entendre and prurient
jocosity, whether obscure or apparent. In other words,
speak truthfully, naturally, clearly, purely, but do not
use large words.
[Notes and Queries, 11 Feb. 1893.]>>
Julie Krueger
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