The Elegant Variation: I SUPPOSE "GROW A BACKBONE" WOULD HAVE BEEN SIMPLISTIC ...

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December 23, 2003

I SUPPOSE "GROW A BACKBONE" WOULD HAVE BEEN SIMPLISTIC ...

... but then I have been accused of being simplistic once or twice in the past, it's true. CJR takes a slightly more nuanced look at how CBS should have handled the Reagan affair.

CBS made three mistakes in its handling of "The Reagans":
Its first mistake was to produce an entertainment series that focused on President Reagan's personal life while he is suffering from serious illness and being cared for by his wife. That's called bad taste.

Its second mistake was to succumb to outside pressure by abruptly canceling the series and putting it on Showtime, its more restricted cable network. That's called setting a terrible precedent.

CBS's third mistake was to deny that it had caved in to outside pressure and claim it was a "moral call." That's called misleading.

I'm sure TMFTML could come up with a hilarious fourth, fifth and sixth mistake, but I just don't have that kinda energy right now, ya know?

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The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

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THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

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December 23, 2003