The British comedian, actor, author and campaigner Russell Brand won the 2014 Foot in Mouth Award yesterday evening from the Plain English Campaign for examples of incoherent prose like this from his book Revolution:Okay, there are a lot of things you could say about that sentence - it's florid, it's wordy, it's self-parodyingly overly adorned, somebody needs to take his Thesaurus away from him - but it's perfectly coherent. I didn't even have to read it twice.This attitude of churlish indifference seems like nerdish deference contrasted with the belligerent antipathy of the indigenous farm folk, who regard the hippie-dippie interlopers, the denizens of the shimmering tit temples, as one fey step away from transvestites.
Language Liberalism Freethought Birds Verbing Weirds Language only if you're expecting it to work in a simple way. This is a special case of the more general truth that Language Weirds. Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time. The church says Earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence in a shadow than the church. If we can't find Heaven, there are always bluejays.
Wednesday, December 03, 2014
Incoherent?
From the Sic! section of Michael Quinion's World Wide Words newsletter, this submission:
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