The Elegant Variation: WE LOVE YOU, YOU'RE WONDERFUL. NOW GO BACK AND JOIN THE SWIFT BOAT CRAZIES BENEATH YOUR ROCK.

TEV DEFINED

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."

September 14, 2004

WE LOVE YOU, YOU'RE WONDERFUL. NOW GO BACK AND JOIN THE SWIFT BOAT CRAZIES BENEATH YOUR ROCK.

L.A. Publicists are fighting back! Disturbed by what they perceive as their bad rap, they are uniting to forge an "informational awareness campaign."

This sort of thing really is completely irony-proof, isn't it?

Posted by TEV at 12:07 AM | Permalink

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September 14, 2004