Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Lawrence, the anti-Nabokov
Monday, September 28, 2009
Orwell
(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.
(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.
(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
All of this is the journalist in Orwell manifesting himself. Straight, simple, to the point, easy to read - this is all characteristically journalistic. I’m sure he hated both Joyce for his never-ending sentences and Nabokov for his overly intellectual language. Most of this piece is formatted in lists such as the above. Making list and using simple language makes it harder to argue with him because his ideas are so cleanly formatted. It’s almost as if a lawyer wrote this.
There are a lot of pattern 1 and pattern 2 and pattern 3 sentence structures. However, the following has a combination of pattern 3 combined with a 16a-ish pattern– “If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.” But mostly we find either pattern 2 or 3 and a ton of modifiers companied with metaphors.
Here we have an a complex sentence with multiple layers followed by Orwellian Metaphor – “But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”
Lastly, I will deconstruct the following:
“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity [simple sentence]. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink [Dependent clauses followed with a modifiers and metaphor]. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics [simple sentence]." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia [16 and 4]. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer [7a]. I should expect to find--this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify--that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship [11a].”
Sunday, September 20, 2009
Joyce
Not long before she had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her husband by waltzing with him to Mr. Power's accompaniment.
In her days of courtship, Mr. Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon his other arm [Compound sentence with semicolon, no conjunction].
After three weeks she had found a wife's life irksome and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had become a mother[A series with variation].
The part of mother presented to her no insuperable difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for her husband [pattern9a].
Her two eldest sons were launched [simple].
One was in a draper's shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea- merchant in Belfast.
They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money [pattern 7a].
The other children were still at school [Simple sentence].
Poetic devices noted:
Alliteration - "Celebrated her silver" and "intimacy with her husband by waltzing"
Strange word choice - irksome
Repetition - "mother. The part of mother..."
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Lolita
Sunday, September 13, 2009
Bill Clinton
Clinton's speech makes many attempt at convincing his audience that he's simply one of us. For example, he starts with"My fellow citizens", then uses the words "we" and "us" repeatedly. Each word shows up sixty plus times throughout the speech.
He also uses running sentences in order to give off a kind of sincerity:
"And I thank the millions of men and women whose steadfastness and sacrifice triumphed over Depression, fascism and Communism. | |
Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues." But there were also periodic sentences to convey the same ideas: |
"Today, a generation raised in the shadows of the Cold War assumes new responsibilities in a world warmed by the sunshine of freedom but threatened still by ancient hatreds and new plagues."
Obviously, there was much mentioned about the American struggle in the past and how that effected the then present time.
I noticed there was a lot of mention of change, the word occurs eleven times to be exact. His mention of change went hand-in-hand with his emphasis on hope despite the evident struggles to be faced. This, of course, reminded me much of Obama.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
A silver dish
Overall I noticed that the author tends to arrange sentences like he rearranges his story. First comes the subject of the story, his father. Then comes all these details and repetitions. He sneaks important information out of nowhere. His transitions are sudden, which makes the reader feel like they're on a roller coaster. He tells the story in different bursts of perspective in regards to time. First we are with pop, then he is dead, then we are back with him, and so on.
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
???
A Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, told AP news agency a suicide bomber had targeted Mr Laghmani." and later continues in past tesnse with little to no verbs such as "Reports say a suicide bomber detonated his explosives in a crowd of officials - including Mr Laghmani - who had gathered outside the mosque in Mehtar Lam for a ceremony."