What constitutes "good" writing in the 20th and 21st centuries is more the result of ideology than a discovery of the innate purity of Anglo-Saxon thought and expression (so pure the Anglo-Saxons didn't sully themselves by writing much that is memorable beyond Beowulf).I've written about Butterworth before -- he's also the author of a charming defense of the semicolon, "Pause Celebre," published in the Financial Times in 2005.
Hat tip: Chris Shea of Brainiac, my Globe Ideas colleague.
3 comments:
Really? What about "The Battle of Maldon"?
Personally, I like them both. It isn't the length of the words that make good writing.
Winston Churchill said that short words are best, and the old short words best of all, and he followed his own precept: "blood, toil, tears, and sweat." But if you look at his work as a whole, you will find that he could produce positively Augustan sentences.
Latinate words and constructions are as much a part of the heritage of English as the Anglo-Saxon, and a wise writer would not deprive himself of both resources.
Can you explain the following pronunciation, please? The British pronounce "W" as "double u" as it stems from the Latin. How is it pronounced "dubyu" in the US?
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