Word: syntax
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...sort of thing, says Barzun in the Atlantic Monthly, may be bad writing, but it is nevertheless harmless. The real danger to language "does not come from such trifles. It comes rather from the college-bred millions who . . . circulate the prevailing mixture of jargon, cant, vogue words, and loose syntax that passes for prose." Barzun calls this "the infinite duplication of dufferism...
...defense table in Saltanatabad barracks, the deposed Premier of Iran kept up a running commentary on Prosecutor Brigadier General Hussein Azemudeh's attempt to have him convicted of treason. He feigned shock, horror, innocence, fear of assassination, and sleep; he corrected the prosecutor's grammar and syntax, wowed the courtroom crowd with witty ad libs, laughed at the court's most damaging evidence, and finally developed a most economical retort that required no effort...
Indeed, "up-and-coming public school educationists are not talking about substituting one scholarly discipline for another . . . They are talking-as clearly as their antipathy for grammar and syntax permits them to talk-about the elimination of all the scholarly disciplines...
...volume left him poorer than before, he turned reluctantly to fiction. For 30 years thereafter he slogged away, writing novels that nobody could understand and consoling himself with poems that only a few poets wanted to read. Typically, even George Meredith's everyday letters were written in a syntax so impenetrable that they needed a second or third reading...
...press conference last week, Attorney General Brownell, Hoover's boss, told reporters that the formal investigation of McCarthy's financial conduct was continuing-presumably under the guidance of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Then a reporter asked him a question that fouled Brownell in his own syntax: "Do you think it appropriate for a member of the Justice Department to make a statement evaluating the character of a person whose affairs are under study in the department...