Posts Tagged ‘Strunk and White’
“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar”*…
POLICE CHIEF
Strunk! White! Get your asses in here!STRUNK and WHITE enter, shooting sidelong glances at each other. Before they can sit, the COMMISSIONER flings a newspaper at them; WHITE clumsily catches it.
POLICE CHIEF
Look at this disaster!WHITE (reading the headlines)
“Police Not Effective as Campus Stalked by Crossword Killer, Student Body in Terror.” Oh, Christ, what a mess.STRUNK
Indeed.POLICE CHIEF
You’re damn right it is! I just got off the phone with the mayor, and let me tell you, she is not happy!STRUNK
I can see why. An evasive denial rather than a definite assertion, the passive voice — haven’t the copy writers even taken basic composition? And that gruesome phrase, “student body”! My god! “Studentry” is a much more elegant term! Or simply “students.”
More at “Scenes From Our Unproduced Screenplay: ‘Strunk & White: Grammar Police’.”
* Michel de Montaigne
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As we ponder our parsing, we might recall that it was on this date in 1969 that the BBC premiered a new comedy sketch show– then improbably, now legendarily– entitled Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
Plain English…
On the heels of National Grammar Day: these and other “corrected” covers at “If Strunk and White Had Titled Some Famous Novels.”
[TotH to Pop Loser… the title of this post is an allusion to the manual your correspondent prefers to Elements of Style— the Plain English Handbook.]
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As we allow for idiosyncrasy, we might send melodious birthday greeting to Henry Purcell; he was born on this date in 1959 (or on September 10 of that year; scholars are divided). An accomplished organist, Purcell is best remembered as one of the leading Baroque composers of his time (e.g., Dido and Aeneas, The Fairy-Queen [an adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream]). Indeed, he was the most famous native-born English composer until Edward Elgar.
Hear Purcell’s “Toccata in A Major” here.
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