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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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« SAY IT WITH US: CHURCHILL, REAL. HOLMES, FICTIONAL | Main | NOBEL PLAGIARIST? »

February 05, 2008

MUCH TO BE MODEST ABOUT

Once you get past the disagreement between the headline and the article, there's no escaping the fact that Americans aren't the only historical illiterates in the world.

A new study has shown that a whopping 25% of people in Britain believe Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill was a myth, while the majority of those questioned in the poll believed Sherlock Holmes to be real.

Posted by TEV at 12:07 AM in Words Fail |

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