Yes, there's evolving and there's devolving. What about the grammar here:
"And though one might avoid the margins his lobby was too tiny not to step on the paint when crossing it."
Dorothy Sayers' response to this (yes, I love that woman):
"Who stepped on the paint? The lobby? Who crossed? The lobby? Crossed what? Did the lobby, in an access of religious fervour, cross itself? It cannot be "one" who stepped and crossed, for "one" is marooned in a parenthesis and, having successfully avoided the margins, can trip no further. Nor is it easy to see why, if "one" could grammatically be the crosser, he should not avoid the paint; for, if the lobby was too small to be cleared at a stride, then the larger the lobby the shorter the crossing; which is ridiculous. Clearly it was the little lobby whose infant strides were to short to cross the paint without doing damage."
Now that is enjoyable.
Oh, and what about badly combined metaphors; very confusing for visual thinkers. They can be funny, though, as in "the discovery of the mare's nest by the pursuit of the red herring".
A sequence of words I just found in the same book I took the above grammatical analysis from: "deliberate miracle-mongering". Try to say that twenty times. [edit: why twenty? because twenty is a nicer word than ten...]
28 Nov 2004, 11:03 am
