Cearta.ie

William Safire (NYT bio | wikipedia), a New York Times Magazine columnist on language, has the following vignette in today’s column (sub no longer req’d!):

A Pet Named Peeve

Two cheerful dogs grace our household, but in my imagination we also have a dog named Peeve. He is perpetually grumpy; complains about his dog food, collar is too tight, bed lumpy, not getting enough exercise, all that. What especially gets his hackles to rise is human language he doesn’t understand.

Disinterested puts him off. When he turns his nose up at a bowl of dry kibble and I say, “Whatsamatter, disinterested in eating?” this erudite Portuguese water dog emits a low growl. He and I know that word means “objective, fair, without a partisan slant or pecuniary involvement.” But it is used by writers who mean “uninterested” and allowed to stand, reeking of misuse, undermining clarity, by editors who could (not) care less. I can’t tell you what my pet, Peeve, scornfully does on a newspaper that treats the language with such unrespect.

Exactly!…

George Orwell (left) wrote that when he was about sixteen, he “suddenly discovered the joy of mere words, i.e. the sounds and associations of words. The lines from PARADISE LOST,

So hee with difficulty and labour hard
Moved on: with difficulty and labour hee.

which do not now seem to me so very wonderful, sent shivers down my backbone; and the spelling ‘hee’ for ‘he’ was an added pleasure”.

(See his essay Why I Write, in which he concluded that writers typically write out of sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, or political impulse – if you’re a blogger, which one explains you? Do you recognise yourself in his conclusion that “[a]ll writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery”?).

Anyway, I was reminded of this when I recently came across John Wesley’s wonderful post on PickTheBrain about George Orwell’s 5 Rules for Effective Writing Style. Here are edited highlights: …