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In my short time on this board I have noticed an interest in bad writing in several places- threads on William McGonagall, some comments in the ‘What are you reading’ thread. So I propose we establish a Language Atrocity Tribunal, for the exhibition and condemnation of Crimes Against the English Language.
Rules as follows:
1. Identify an Atrocity committed against the English Language (in any medium at all) and quote selectively and luridly from it, explaining context and whatever possessed its author to write it.(if poss.)
2. Suggest a suitable punishment for the offender. The Barbelith Language Atrocity Tribunal does not recognise the UN Declaration of Human Rights. Therefore all suggestions should be as mediaeval as poss.
3. No pedantry. This is about Language Atrocities. All quotes should be dire to unreadable. We are not interested in misplaced apostrophes.
First Up- Sir Thomas Urquhart, madman and alleged mathematician (1611-1660).
Here he is looking cavalier
The Charge: Neological logorrhea and fibbing.
The Evidence:
1. ‘In amblygonosphericalls, which admit both of an extrinsecall and intrinsecall demission of the perpendicular, nineteen severall parts are to be considered...
The axioms of plain triangles are four, viz. Rulerst, Eproso, Grediftal and Bagrediffiu.
The directory of tis second axiome is Pubkegdaxesh, which declareth that there are seven enodandas grounded on it, to wit, four rectangular, Upalem, Ubeman, Ekarul, Egalem, and three obliquangular, Danarele, Xemenoro and Shenerolem’
2.‘Why, I could truly have enlarged my discourse with a choicer variety of phrase, and made it overflow the field of the readers understanding, with an inundation of greater eloquence . . . schematologetically adorning the proposed theme with the most especial and chief flowers of the garden of rhetoric . . . I could have introduced, in case of obscurity, synonymal, exargastic and palilogetic elucidations; for sweetness of phrase, antimetathetic commutations of epithets; for the vehement excitation of a matter, exclamation in the front, and epiphonemas in the rear. I could have used, for the promptlier stirring up of passion, apostrophal and prosopopoeial diversions; and, for the appeasing and settling of them, some epanorthotic revocations and aposiopetic restraints . . . But I hold it now expedient, without further ado, to stop the current of my pen . . . and write with simplicity.’
3.Apparently a love scene in a Romance:
‘by vertue of the intermutual unlimitedness of their visotactil sensation... the visuriency of either, by ushering the tacturiency of both, made the attrectation of both consequent to the inspection of either. Here was it that action was passive and action passive, they both being overcome by either-and each the conqueror.’
The Punishment:
Sir Thomas is now unfortunately dead and has been so for some time. Apparently he died laughing when he heard the King had been restored. Therefore the issue of punishment is a knotty one. However, since the Inquisition on which this Tribunal is modelled had no problem with digging people up to put them on trial, I suggest we do the same with Urquhart.
On the return of the inevitable guilty verdict, his corpse would be handed over to Gunther von Hagen, who, working in conjunction with those people who do the animatronic Dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum, would re-animate his corpse.
The corpse would then be forced to man an enquiry desk for eternity. Each query would have to be answered using only monosyllabic words ending in s. All customers would be crack-addled paranoid psychopaths with an inferiority complex about their congenital lisps. Who have to have everything said to them three times before they understand it. |
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