6/24/2023 0 Comments The sense of style pinker![]() ![]() ![]() "And now the moment I've been waiting for: I get to be a purist!" The misuse of criteria as a singular noun irks him as badly as "nails on a chalkboard". Permissive on the subject of dangling modifiers, prepositions at the end of sentences, 'their' used as singular, Pinker has pet likes and hates about distinctions between similar-sounding words. Pinker offers comfort to the multitudes who feel flummoxed by the bitter and windy debate about correctness. A favoured quirk is the blowing of extended raspberries: language purists are "sticklers, pedants, peevers, snobs, snoots. His manner varies between the expository and the ludic, mandarin and vernacular. Sugaring his pill with cartoons, he salts it with diagrams. Valuing images as mnemonics, Pinker coins them memorably: verbal coffins, zombie nouns, morbidly obese phrases. But once underway, The Sense of Style is a canny and punchy polemic. Pinker's first chapter, with its feeble close readings of undistinguished textual excerpts, is a darling ripe for execution. "Murder your darlings," Arthur Quiller-Couch instructed Cambridge students in 1916. A style expert must demonstrate consummate style. ![]()
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