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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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May 22, 2008

WAYS OF SEEING

ReadySteadyBook informs us that John Berger's indispensible Ways of Seeing is now up on YouTube.

Drop everything.  We are.

Posted by TEV at 11:31 AM in Obsessions |

Comments

What a wonderful surprise. You can't even buy it in NTSC. I had to have a pirate copy made from PAL years ago. (The only BBC art program that never got shown in America, but we know why, don't we?)

Posted by: John Shannon | May 22, 2008 at 04:27 PM

Why do you think it wasn't shown?

Posted by: Noah | May 25, 2008 at 02:43 PM

Thank you, thank you so much for this! This is awesome...
You're awesome...
this site is awesome...

Posted by: Lesley-Ann Brown | June 06, 2008 at 11:50 PM

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