war against english the language: unstitching for naught

Is verbal usage simply a matter of social usage, an aspect of etiquette? …

The war against the English language is thus a many pronged offensive, waged amid jungles of jargon, over oceans of Officialese, prairies of pedantry, mountains of meringue, while the air and cyberworld oscillates with electronic frenzy. The common bond that unites the foe is utter disdain for the reader. Each saboteaur at the keyboard is preoccupied solely with their own objectives. Whether for reasons of indifference, incapacity, or indolence, they choose to ignore Dr. Johnson’s crucial precept:

`What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.”

---Tennessee Williams, 1970.---click image for source...

—Tennessee Williams, 1970.—click image for source…

Writers of the past respected this axiom and sometimes rephrased it in other ways, as did Yeats, for example who wrote:

A line will take us hours maybe,
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.

---Sylvia Plath  "There’s something magical about catching a glimpse of one of your favorite authors at work – even a photo of the epic event can send an anxious thrill down your spine, as if you might be able to see some hint of literary genius in posture or setting, in attire or facial expression. And it’s even better if they’re working on a typewriter."--click for image source...

—Sylvia Plath
“There’s something magical about catching a glimpse of one of your favorite authors at work – even a photo of the epic event can send an anxious thrill down your spine, as if you might be able to see some hint of literary genius in posture or setting, in attire or facial expression. And it’s even better if they’re working on a typewriter.”–click for image source…

Anatole France expressed it thus: Caressez longtemps votre phrase, elle finira par sourire.” And E.B. White, also in the no pain no gain mode, wrote:

Writing is, for most, laborious and slow. The mind travels faster than the pen; consequently, writing becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up. Like other gunners, he must cultivate patience; he may have to work many covers to bring down one partridge.Read More:http://grammar.about.com/od/writersonwriting/a/ebwonwriting_2.htm

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One Response to war against english the language: unstitching for naught

  1. Paul Krautter says:

    … a corollary, art without effort is without pleasure as well.

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