Apparently, the new novel "The Rotters' Club" by Jonathan Coe contains just 13,955 words.
Oh, but all 13,955 of them form just one sentence. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/reports/archive/arts/sentence.shtml
I'm withholding judgment until my inner copy editor puts down her Uzi.
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4 comments:
Glad to hear I'm not the only one who dislikes such sentences.
Yeah, while I really do have to be careful about the whole contempt-prior-to-investigation thing, this one really does reek of the marketing-gimmick thang.
I'm a huge abuser of the english language. I'm actually proud of it. One thing I won't do is murder it by gimmicks, though. All of my mistakes are honest to goodness stupidity. Some funny, some sad. All real and on rare ocassion, somewhat funny. You know, like Chevy Chase used to be back in the good old days. :)
Me, too! I never was really able to articulate how I feel about "abuse" of the language until I was doing a radio interview one day and the words kind of popped out of my mouth. The interviewer was asking about grammar pedantry and people's fear of grammar and I found myself saying, "Language isn't a prison. It's a playground."
I'm all for the kind of abuse you describe and, though I'm reluctant to make further disparaging assumptions about a book I haven't read, I don't like gimmicks.
Also: Isn't it just like a man to say describe the good-old-days Chevy Chase as "somewhat funny"? A woman would have said "somewhat sexy."
: )
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