The Elegant Variation: THE FIRST LADY OF LIMN

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May 17, 2007

THE FIRST LADY OF LIMN

Speaking of reviews and reviewers, we wondered if we were merely imagining Michiko Kakutani's absolutely relentless overuse of "limn" - it shows up in the first paragraph of her review of Falling Man - so we took a trip back into the archives to see just how bad it really is. This is as far as we got until boredom overtook us:

The Post Birthday World: "... Ms. Shriver’s instinctive knowledge of her heroine’s heart and mind and her ability to limn Irina’s very different relationships ... "

Theories of Everything: " ... her capacity to limn everything from the existential and Dada-esque ..."

Collected Stories, Saul Bellow: " ... attempts to limn the last days of an alcoholic frontierswoman ... "

Emergence: "But ''Emergence'' does limn some of its burgeoning manifestations."

Getting a Life: " ... funny and disturbing stories that limn the middle- and upper-middle-class world of London ... "

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: " ... using his copious gifts of language to limn his characters' state of mind."

Love: " ... Ms. Morrison employs the sort of didactic language she used in the ham-handed ''Paradise'' to limn the women's relationships to each other ... "

Brotherhood of the Bomb: " ... he fails to fully limn the social and geopolitical fallout ... "

A Simple Habana Melody: " ... empathize with his characters and to limn their inner lives ... "

The Black Veil: " ... eye for social detail that enable him to limn the discontents of his childhood ... "

The Doctor's House: " ... demonstrated the author's ability to limn her characters' inner lives ... "

Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: " ... Ms. Munro has created tales that limn entire lifetimes in a handful of pages ... "

John Adams: " ... his political sounding board and most trusted confidant, limn a marriage of enduring passion ... "

Back When We Were Grownups: " ... used her generous gifts of compassion to limn the interior lives of Rebecca and her family ... "

Speaking with the Angel: " ... the author's pitch-perfect ear for how people talk to limn a man's sudden apprehension of vulnerability and loss ... "

The First American: " ... never penetrates Franklin's placid demeanor to limn his inner life ... "

There's more, people ... oh, there's so much more. We've merely limned the ... oh, never mind.

Posted at 12:09 AM in Words Fail | Permalink

Comments

Dennis Johnson had the same idea 5 years ago: http://www.mobylives.com/Limning_Kakutani.html

Posted by: Sarah | May 17, 2007 at 05:13 AM

It must be in her contract, just as there must be a rule that every issue of the NYTBR uses the word "brio" at least once.

Posted by: K.G. Schneider | May 17, 2007 at 05:27 AM

Blame it on the fricking Limn-Council. Ever since the '00 election, where they donated at the Ranger level, it's been the high-fructose corn syrup of book review verbs. I noticed it popping up in the blurbs on my kids' Scholastic Books order forms.

Posted by: Ken | May 17, 2007 at 06:53 AM

Sigh. I love her.

Posted by: Jimmy Beck | May 17, 2007 at 09:54 AM

2002? Was anyone reading blogs then? (I wasn't, so forgive the duplication.)

Posted by: TEV | May 17, 2007 at 10:31 AM

Reminds of when Frank Gifford was in the booth at Monday Night Football and someone pointed out that the Old Trojan opined "This is a real hard-hitting football game" every single game. He never said it again.

Posted by: Jim | May 17, 2007 at 11:39 AM

There's one word Ms Kakutani uses twice as often as 'limn,' and it's 'dazzling.'

--Limn/-ed/-ing = 70ish times since 1985
--Dazzling = 150ish times since 1981

Posted by: Paul | May 17, 2007 at 05:59 PM

There was a great "NB" column in the Times Literary Supplement a few months ago proposing a retirement of "limn" from their reviews.

Posted by: Kevin | May 18, 2007 at 09:48 AM

That's fucking hysterical.

Posted by: Anna Clark | May 18, 2007 at 10:18 AM

(scribbling serious note to self)
Avoid depending on verbal crutches....

Posted by: Celia Hayes | May 19, 2007 at 11:49 AM

Equally annoying is Michiko's overuse of "stunning" and "dazzling" whenever she wants to praise a book.

Posted by: Sarah | May 20, 2007 at 05:09 AM

There limn and then I also grow weary of book reviews with "spare language." It all leads one to think that there must be a program for reviewers. Put in the title, a couple of character names, a plot (usually provided by the PR department of the publisher), place. There you go. Then fill in a few more blanks and there is your book review.

Posted by: Lyn Lejeune | May 20, 2007 at 01:10 PM

This is too funny!

Brought back memories of a good segment on NPR's Fresh Air by linguist Geoffrey Nunberg on use of the word "roil."

After I heard that segment years ago, I still see the word pop up everywhere -- even in fiction. And no, I don't read Gothic romances or porn which are the only places Nunberg says he sees the word spring up in fiction.

Here's a link to the piece. Makes for a good read:

http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/roil.html

Posted by: Poornima | May 21, 2007 at 05:29 PM

She went out on a limn and you sawed it off.
Or:
She might need to see a prosthetics specialist for a new limn.

Posted by: BlogDog | May 30, 2007 at 08:14 AM

The comments to this entry are closed.

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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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Dictation: A Quartet by Cynthia Ozick

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Diary of a Bad Year by J. M. Coetzee

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*Now in Paperback*

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SECOND LOOK

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
The Rider by Tim Krabbe

Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 17, 2007

THE FIRST LADY OF LIMN

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

The Elegant Variation

A Literary Weblog. A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog "Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

May 17, 2007

THE FIRST LADY OF LIMN

Comments

MY NOVEL

WORTHY READINGS

TEV DEFINED

RECOMMENDED

THIS GUN FOR HIRE: Reviews & Criticism

SECOND LOOK

Categories

A Literary Weblog.
A Guardian Top 10 Literary Blog * A Forbes "Best of the Web" Pick * A Los Angeles Magazine Top Los Angeles Blog
"Really brave ... or really stupid" - NPR

THIS GUN FOR HIRE:
Reviews & Criticism