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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 & SPECIAL GIVEAWAY: JOSHUA FERRIS | Main | THINGS TO DO IN ROCHESTER »

March 26, 2008

ESCHEW YOU

It's interesting to note that Paper Cuts' seven deadly words of book reviewing are exclusively words of praise.  (Though, presumably, "shite" - and "slight" - would be similar no-nos.)  Which raises the question: Are words of praise inherently less interesting than words of criticism?  Or are they merely overused, as Ruth Franklin observed (we were going to say "intriguingly" but stopped ourselves) back when she reviewed David Mitchell's Black Swan Green:

The writer seeking fresh language with which to express her enthusiasm soon discovers that this particular vocabulary has been colonized by p.r. flacks whipping up empty, fluffy blurbs. The result is that all praise now feels like exaggerated praise. Sixty years ago, Orwell famously complained of the book reviewer's clich�s, the "stale old phrases" that get trotted out in the desperation of deadlines: "a book that no one should miss," "something memorable on every page." Nothing has changed, not even the syntax. In this blurbing age, we are still deluged by dizzy claims: that a novelist we know to be decidedly mediocre is "like a latter-day Dostoyevsky," or that a pop historian's latest hack job should be "required reading in living rooms from coast to coast," or that "every single note is perfection" in a piece of chick lit so bad that I could manage only a few chapters.

For the record, we frequently eschew, both in writing and in conversation.

Posted by TEV at 11:21 AM in Reviews |

Comments

I've been told you should eschew an idea 32 times before you finally swallow it!

Posted by: Ron Hogan | March 26, 2008 at 12:02 PM

"Eschew" was the one that bugged me, too. The others are essentially cases of imprecise usage stripping perfectly good words of useful, specific meaning. The objection to eschew, on the other hand, was based entirely on the statement that one would never use it in conversation, which seems a far less sound reason to object.

Posted by: Levi Stahl | March 26, 2008 at 12:22 PM

The incidence of adjectives in a review is a function of its length limits. If I only get 800 words or less, I am strapped to the use of adjectives. And there are only so many adjectives.

Go Wao! Go Tinajero!

Posted by: CesarBruto | March 26, 2008 at 12:26 PM

I wrote a review a while back for Three Apples Fell from Heaven that described it as an excellent treatment of family, memory and loss, which it is, but I felt compelled to throw in a mention of how cheap that particular currency has become.

And since Cesar has already turned this into a ToB thread, I'll follow along. The Diaz/Bolano semifinal should be the final, and Ferris/McCarthy should be fighting it out for third and fourth.

Posted by: James | March 26, 2008 at 01:07 PM

What, no "limn?"

Posted by: Garth | March 26, 2008 at 01:24 PM

"The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's." Talk about exaggerated praise! When I first read this recommendation, I imagined that upon reading this book pale, diaphanous smoke would engulf me and that the world would open up to me. Who am I, Abraham? Yes, praise is often exaggerated and suffers terribly from misuse and malapropism. It's too bad that negative comments often suffer from the same shortcomings.

Posted by: Brian | March 26, 2008 at 01:31 PM

"The God I want to believe in has a voice and a sense of humor like Denis Johnson's." Talk about exaggerated praise! When I first read this recommendation, I imagined that upon reading this book pale, diaphanous smoke would engulf me and that the world would open up to me. Who am I, Abraham? Yes, praise is often exaggerated and suffers terribly from misuse and malapropism. It's too bad that negative comments often suffer from the same shortcomings.

Posted by: Brian | March 26, 2008 at 01:32 PM

I'm totally withcha Jaime. Los Suicidas vs. The Mongoose should have been the final.

Next year 2666 vs. The Lazarus Project?

2666 vs. What Can I Do When Everything's on Fire?

2666 vs. Your Face Tomorrow (Volumes I,II, and III)?

And how can I not turn any thread into a ToB thread?

ToB is so freeking exciting. It's the first thing I check when I wake up. It's like, super compelling.

Posted by: Cesar Bruto | March 26, 2008 at 01:36 PM

Oh yeah:

I am never (never?) reading (since when you read?) anything (our nada who art in nada) by that Elizabeth Kiem person (que bruta!).

Posted by: Cesar Bruto | March 26, 2008 at 01:44 PM

They should throw in "bracing."

Posted by: Matt Pearce | March 27, 2008 at 08:00 AM

"eschew: No one actually says this word in real life. It appears almost exclusively in writing when the perp is stretching for a flashy synonym for avoid or reject or shun."

Tin-eared bluenoses should eschew the writing of proscriptive doodles about writing. No word is automatically off-limits, as every word carries its own sound, rhythm and shade of meaning. It's not the *word* itself, but the writer's combination of words, that makes a cliché (or not). Otherwise, we could never use the words "life", "love", "food", "the", "and" and so on...

Posted by: Steven Augustine | March 27, 2008 at 08:05 AM

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