Word: nessing
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Grammarwise, it is permissible to tailfin any word with the suffix meaning "in the manner of." Estheticswise, it is deplorable-businesswise, dollarwise, saleswise and weathering are all barbarisms that deserve to be barred. And now with a word to the wise comes an equally formidable enemy: ness, denoting "state, quality or condition." It is not the friendly suffix of greatness, goodness, loveliness (properly forming abstract nouns from adjectives) or even Loch Ness, but a whole new invasion of language spotted by Professor Dorothy N. Foote of California's San Jose State College...
...Critic, published by the College English Association, Teacher Foote reports that ness added to nouns, pronouns, verbs and phrases-a custom thought until now to be mostly whimsical, as in whyness or everydayness-has become popular among distinctly unjocose people. In Clock Without Hands, Novelist Carson McCullers repeatedly alludes to livingness-meaning, as Teacher Foote sees it, "the hum of hot blood, the buzz, the throb of passion," which is perhaps also "felt sappily by flowers and vegetables." Thingness, as used by Poet John Ciardi, "the sober Saul of modern letters," apparently connotes some ineffable quality of poetic words when...
Taut Prose. But in spite of popular taste, prose writing was revamped in the North by men who had fought in the war. The battle memoirs of Sherman and Grant, "perfect in concision and clear ness," changed the "clogged and viscous prose" of the prewar days. In the heat of the war these commanders had no time for overblown eloquence. "Their role is to convince and direct," writes Wilson...
...five-year term, though it is never prudent to go to the country at the last moment. He would really have preferred to delay the election until September, he said, but the Liberals' "delaying tactics and obstruction" had made it "al most impossible to proceed with the busi ness of the House." Thus, Diefenbaker explained blandly, "the only course" open to him was to seek dissolution of Parliament and call an immediate election...
They try to achieve tathata (or "such-ness") through prayer, liturgy and ceremonies involving ritual lovemaking and liberal doses of happy pills made from yellow mushrooms. Those who think the only fun in fungi is in a mushroom omelet may be skeptical when they read that things are just short of perfect in Pala-"a small island completely surrounded by twenty-nine hundred million mental cases." And why did not Huxley heed the warning of one of his own characters that "Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers"? Weight of Dandruff. Huxley's hero is William Farnaby, a successful...