{"id":786,"date":"2004-05-03T00:40:24","date_gmt":"2004-05-03T04:40:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2004\/05\/03\/linguists-on-literature\/"},"modified":"2010-08-20T00:45:22","modified_gmt":"2010-08-20T04:45:22","slug":"linguists-on-literature","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/2004\/05\/03\/linguists-on-literature\/","title":{"rendered":"Linguists on Literature"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>People go to great lengths to attack the &#8220;history&#8221; Dan Brown spins in <I>The Da Vinci Code<\/I>, but if you really want to discredit him, there&#8217;s a much easier way: Geofrrey K. Pullum of <I>Language Log<\/I> explains why <A href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/000844.html\">his prose style sucks<\/A>.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>Brown&#8217;s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad. In some passages scarcely a word or phrase seems to have been carefully selected or compared with alternatives. I slogged through 454 pages of this syntactic swill, and it never gets much better. Why did I keep reading? Because London Heathrow is a long way from San Francisco International, and airline magazines are thin, and two-month-old Hollywood drivel on a small screen hanging two seats in front of my row did not appeal, that&#8217;s why.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Meanwhile, one of his blogging partners, Mark Liberman, is <A href=\"http:\/\/itre.cis.upenn.edu\/~myl\/languagelog\/archives\/000845.html\">puzzled <\/A> by the prose stylings of Matthew Pearl as evidenced in <I>The Dante Club<\/I>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>For the first few dozen pages, I figured that Pearl was just trying to give his prose a 19th-century tone by using awkward constructions, making up unexpected figures of speech, and substituting rare words for common ones&#8230; a much more plausible hypothesis is that Pearl graduated from a slightly different Harvard University, in a universe slightly different from our own, and read a body of English and American literature that is also just a bit different.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>People go to great lengths to attack the &#8220;history&#8221; Dan Brown spins in The Da Vinci Code, but if you really want to discredit him, there&#8217;s a much easier way: Geofrrey K. Pullum of Language Log explains why his prose style sucks. Brown&#8217;s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}