Current mood:	unclean
Current music:	something juddery and experimental on the radio

Argh! Renowned!
I have no idea what The Da Vinci Code is, but from time to time it pops up in my peripheral vision flagged with "Stop reading this thread now, and go and check on E2 or NationStates or DOMAI". Geoff Pullum reviews it in his usual deft dismantling style, and as I read I realize I've already seen someone take that opening sentence apart -- can't remember where -- nay, that opening word.

This guy starts a novel with the word 'renowned'. You know you're going to burn it. I mean, physically, actually burn the fucker to prevent anyone else having the misfortune to read your copy.

Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum's Grand Gallery. He lunged for the nearest painting he could see, a Caravaggio. Grabbing the gilded frame, the seventy-six-year-old man heaved the masterpiece toward himself until it tore from the wall and Saunière collapsed backward in a heap beneath the canvas.

It's the bad Literotica school of throwing all the description into the first three lines. It's the clunking horribleness of evoking images of Art Gallery and like dude the Louvre and like Old Masters, then scrawling over them with lunging and grabbing and heaving, and not noticing that no this doesn't even out as a nice colloquial style. It's the actual like in fact really actual ungrammaticality of a Principle C violation: He... Saunière... I think not. It's some ghastly, clammy tin-earedness that can't pick up the way English-speakers use logophors, and you can't say 'toward(s) himself' if you're not describing the action from his viewpoint. The whole thing makes my skin crawl.

Oh, and apparently I'm the third of the three people in the world who haven't read it. Must be like Sambuca: big TV campaign, and I'm out having my brain stimulated that century and miss it all.

Look, if anyone ever tries to claim that linguists just accept anything anyone writes with a beatific lamaic smile of tolerance, well, we don't. I hate bad writing. Geoff Pullum hates bad writing. We also don't like ignoramuses claiming there are imaginary rules of grammar on invisible stone tablets; but when it comes down to violating real rules, as in the ones native speakers don't transgress... such as not sticking personal names in after pronouns (gong!! Principle C violation)... the tin ear that can write that is capable of anything.


We have good writing and we have bad writing. Jane Austen and Dickens and Fitzgerald and many others, they flow. They're balanced. We get surprises at interesting moments; we get summations when they're needed; we find explanations following from causes at the right pace. It all works. It doesn't go clunk.