January 30, 2019

"His book is in love with the toothsomeness of language... 'Hyphenated vulgarities,' such as blow-job, 'are comically dainty'..."

"... Dreyer says. Novels can 'shimmy.' Parentheses have elbows. The author’s delight in his tool kit is palpable, as when he enthuses about ending a sentence shaped like a question with a period rather than a question mark. ('It makes a statement, doesn’t it.') Defending the semicolon, Dreyer quotes at length the opening of 'The Haunting of Hill House,' by Shirley Jackson, breathlessly celebrating the passage’s 'tightly woven, almost claustrophobic ideas . . . a paragraph that grabs you by the hand.' He takes a tinkerer’s joy in breaking apart syntax and putting it back together. Restrictive clauses are like Legos to him. 'There’s something bracingly attractive,' he declares, 'about a sentence that brims with parallelism.' It is as if he has thrown open a window on a starry night in winter and stuck his face outside...."

From "The Hedonic Appeal of 'Dreyer’s English'" by Katy Waldman (in The New Yorker). and here's “Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style" by Benjamin Dreyer.

12 comments:

tim in vermont said...

Isn’t “utterly” redundant?

gilbar said...

they should have said: The Most Correctest guide

Bay Area Guy said...

I see what you did, Althouse! You raised the issue of hyphenated blow-jobs, but without reference to Aftican-Indian Presidential candidate, Kamala Harris.

Well done!

Ficta said...

I got confused and thought: "Oh cool. Geoff Dyer has a new book out." I realized my mistake, but then I discovered that Geoff Dyer does indeed have a new book coming out next month. So that's nice.

Sebastian said...

"'There’s something bracingly attractive,' he declares, 'about a sentence that brims with parallelism.' It is as if he has thrown open a window on a starry night in winter and stuck his face outside."

So parallelism is "bracing" sorta kinda like cold air on your face? Writing a sentence with parallelism is sorta kinda like throwing open a window?

If you say so.

MadisonMan said...

"Hyphenated" "Non-Hyphenated"

Cracks me up every time.

Wince said...

Parentheses have elbows. The author’s delight in his tool kit is palpable, as when he enthuses about ending a sentence shaped like a question with a period rather than a question mark.

"He would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark."

The Godfather said...

It's always seemed to me that writers who use "creative" puncuation and such are trying to capture the effect of an oral presentation. Sometimes it works (e.e. cummings).

Maillard Reactionary said...

Does "Non-Hyphenated" have a hyphen? Should it?

Kurt Godel, call your office. (Please imagine the umlaut over the "o" there.)

If he (the reviewer, or the author) finds certain language "toothsome", maybe it's because he has to eat his words a lot.

whitney said...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/07/a-readers-manifesto/302270/
An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose

From 2001.

Two-eyed Jack said...

Whitney, thanks. I have been looking for that Atlantic piece for several years!

sdharms said...

the whole thing is bullshit and anyone who doesn't agree is a moron.