LANGUAGE

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Read this:



Jack Reacher caught the last of the summer sun in a small town on the coast of Maine, and then, like the birds in the sky above him, he began his long migration south. But not, he thought, straight down the coast. Not like the orioles and the buntings and the phoebes and the warblers and the ruby throated humming birds. Instead he decided on a diagonal route, south and west, from the top right hand corner of the country to the bottom left...


Those are the opening words of PastTense by Lee Child. Count the number of words with three syllables! I count just three apart from the birds, which, of course, are listed.
Here is Charles Dickens in a Tale of Two Cities a couple of hundred years ago when life moved more slowly than it does today:


It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.


I have yellowed the three syllable words. In those days, most of his readers would have had a classical education and they would have expected that. But it is so simple! Here is the master of American/English storytelling in a Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway:


In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.


Just one!


And today's lesson is?          KISS.             Keep it simple, Stupid!








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