Thread: Be a person...
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Old 01-04-2002, 06:20 PM   #42
MaggieL
in the Hour of Scampering
 
Join Date: Jan 2001
Location: Jeffersonville PA (15 mi NW of Philadelphia)
Posts: 4,060
Quote:
Originally posted by dhamsaic
Well. Detach might be a little closer to a real word, but I think the meaning is pretty obvious.
Maybe...but as Nic points out, it's fatiguing to have to constantly make up for a writer's laziness in not using actual English words and syntax to begin with. James Joyce did it for artistic effect; here it's just annoying. It just doesn't pass close "scrunity"...not to be confused with "discrinimation".

"Negligent speech doth not onely discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance. If it be so then in words, which fly and 'scape censure, and where one good Phrase asks pardon for many incongruities and faults, how then shall he be thought wise whose penning is thin and shallow?" --Ben Jonson

And--pardon me--but I find little in common between Jag's writing and Tolkien's. The Ben Jonson above requres some effort to follow, because the construction and diction are archaic; it was written in the 17th century. But the effort is worthwhile, and I don't think Ben's contemporaries had as much trouble with it as we do.

He didn't have any orange peels in his keyboard either--knowing that "it's a poor craftsman that blames his tools..." :-)
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