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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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« L.A. EVENT - VERMIN ON THE MOUNT | Main | TEV GIVEAWAY (& UPDATE): HARRY, REVISED »

March 13, 2008

AMUSING

I'm sitting in an airport where someone just had Elliot Spitzer paged to Gate 32.  No one seemed to notice.  Though it would have been funnier to have him paged to Gate 9.

Posted by TEV at 03:54 PM in Personal |

Comments

That was me. Glad you caught it. ;)

Posted by: Liberty | March 13, 2008 at 08:17 PM

How about Gate 69?

I'm so bad.

Posted by: Jim H. | March 14, 2008 at 11:33 AM

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