Word: syntax
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Ulysses-banned in the U.S. until 1933, when a federal court declared that its incidental obscenities did not make it an obscene book-was hard enough. Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's 'final work, written in a dream language of outrageous puns and unheard-of syntax, was a great deal harder; it could not be read, in the ordinary sense-it had to be unraveled...
...university presses usually mosey along about their useful, traditional business, publishing scholarly biographies, monographs on the pterodactyl or .the mud turtle, studies in the. syntax of Middle English or Middle High German prose. But some of them are broadening their lists, and now the young, enterprising Rutgers University .Press has gone streaking off on its own to corral a Lincoln volume for which almost any big-city commercial publisher would have mortgaged his corporate soul. The Book-of-the-Month Club has made it its February choice,* and 500,000 copies are in print...
...commend the book for its literary qualities. It contains enough gummed-up syntax to patch hell a mile. But as a study in the art of carrying water on both shoulders, of sophistry, of writing with tongue-in-cheek, and of intellectual dishonesty, I think it has no superior since the beginning of time...
Parodies of TIME writing usually begin like "Outraged was snaggletoothed, bilious, ambidextrous Herman Zilch ..." But nowadays TIME editors do not think highly of backward syntax except as an occasional way of emphasizing a point. Spacesaving sometimes forces us to use a string of adjectives to give a thumbnail sketch, but we prefer nouns that make adjectives unnecessary...
...Tennessean calmly printed the entire tirade-adding that it had not corrected "errors of grammar or syntax." The Tennessean also published pictures of two animals and one human being, correctly identifying them: "This is Ed Crump. . . . This is a Quagga. . . . This is a Wanderoo...