Word: syntax
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...this whimsical hobbling of normal syntax? In a Postscript, our author accounts for his mission: "Offhand, with hindsight, I can think of many factors bubbling about in my brain, but I ought to admit right away that its origin was totally haphazard, touch and go, a flip of a coin. It all got out of hand with a companion calling my bluff (I said I could do it, this companion said I could...
...moons ago, Harvard administrators quite reasonably decided to shut down the tiny Linguistics department. Then there were protests, as the dozen or so linguistics students took up tongues against their oppressor. Their angry letters epitomized excellent grammar and syntax, though they were most certainly devoid of common sense and the old Crimson spirit...
...American art and came, in this case, from outside it. De Kooning arrived in the U.S. as an illegal immigrant from Rotterdam in 1926. He was a gifted draftsman who had already achieved a high level of academic training. But he gradually learned to connect that to a modernist syntax, fusing the line of Ingres and the fragmentation of the antique torso to 1930s Picasso and his American derivatives like Arshile Gorky. Seated Figure (Classic Male), 1940, shows the early stage of this process to perfection. The forms through which De Kooning reached abstraction were always connected to an earlier...
...shady and nebulous as plagiarism. Thanks to their computational speed and power, computers can riffle through reams of data and pinpoint patterns of repetition the naked eye might never notice. But what do these patterns signify? Intentional theft? Random clusters of words attracted to each other by grammar or syntax? Something in between? Interestingly enough, some historians who received the Stewart-Feder report decided it exonerated Oates of any suspicion of plagiarism, since the examples showed how much the majority of his writing differed from his presumed sources...
...ornate language which uncannily mimics nineteenth century prose also contributes to this distancing effect. Nailing down the antiquated style presented some difficulties; an Edinburgh scholar of the time period's nonfiction checked Phillips' manuscripts for anachronistic syntax. The language produces an almost surreally understated voice that allows Phillips to write about the horrors of slavery in a eerie, muted fashion. As he says, "you've got all these massive dramas going on--people living in the most unbelievable poverty, people being killed--and [Emily's] writing about it as if it's very polite after dinner conversation...