"The world is changing as we speak. The great untold story of our age is that others need to get a life and the United States needs to move on."
Is anyone here not appalled by this? Here we find no fewer than five cliches/truisms mounted in service of ... what? These two sentences are utterly meaningless. Can anyone guess who had the nerve to put them into print?
6 comments:
I'm thoroughly flummoxed. Who is it?
Tom: Be careful here. If you go grab nonsense-talk from the right, we can just as easily grab equally bad examples from the left.
Agreed that bad prose respects no political ideology. The above clunkers might well have been penned by Molly Ivins. Instead, the author is Victor Davis Hanson, from a recent post by Six. From his cushy perch at the Hoover Institute, Hanson might be expected to put a bit more thought into his prose.
Ahhhh, yes, Victor Davis Hanson. I thought the quote sounded familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. Brilliant guy.
Hopefully Tom, you bothered to read the entire article and not just the last sentence.
Tom: OK, the guy wrote a stupid sentance. I give you that. Now what are we to do?
Surely you and I have never written stupid sentances, owing to our mutual war against cliches and platitudes, nonsense language ("I don't neccessarily aggree" = "I disagree", "the fact of the matter is", "it is what it is", "To be perfectly honest", etc.) and false language ("OJ Simpson pled innocence"). I have posted on this recently as well.
If you read through any 10 essays of Tommy Sowell's (also of the Hoover Inst), you might also find five or so hokey sentances. Shall I go scrutinize ten random essays by a lefty economist of your choosing?
I assume that I would find no more of this sort of blather in Noam Chomskey's last ten essays than in Christopher Hitchens'. Let us unite against blather.
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