Most advocates of clear, simple writing recommend that an author avoid Latinates–longer words drawn from Latin that end in -zation, or -tion, or -ize–and employ the Anglo-Saxon instead. Lie instead of prevarication; kill instead of termination; use instead of utilization. George Orwell cautions against Latinates in his essay “Politics and the English Language”; Strunk & [...]
Entries from July 2006
July 21, 2006
The mind of the maker
Ernest Hemingway once hit out at critics who had analyzed his Nobel-prize winning The Old Man and the Sea:
“There isn’t any symbolism. The sea is the sea. The old man is an old man. The boy is a boy and the fish is a fish. The shark are all sharks no better and no worse. [...]
July 16, 2006
American voices, American exceptionalism
Is there a distinctly American artistic voice? What adjectives might begin to describe that voice? Open. Direct. Optimistic. Democratic. Enthusiastic. Conscious of the natural order. Impatient. Naive. Experimental. Religious. Business-like. Experential. Bluff.
This isn’t just American exceptionalism speaking. There is something different about the American experiment (“a shining city upon a hill”) that should [...]
July 15, 2006
Considering the frozen sea
Frozen sea will consider fiction, poetry, film, and other art forms which have the power to “break up the frozen sea within us,” ( to quote Franz Kafka), more to praise and celebrate than to critique.
With so much wonderful writing, why spend a moment on that which does not “shine forth”?
