Following on from this thread, I’ve often wondered why the language in old books is so “pompous” and “flowery”. Did people really once speak that way? Or is it simply that only very educated people were writing books, and they spoke that way? Or that nobody spoke that way, but writing like that was “the done thing”.
I was trying to think of some examples so I could Google them, but failed, so I just tried “flowery language” and came up with this gem, ironically written as a protest against such overblown verbiage:
They did likes them their most fine and wondrous adjectives.
Drop the extra adjectives, and it does get pretty boring:
Says pretty much the same thing, but with far fewer words. A saying we have in Renaissance Faire is “Why say in one word what you can say in six?”
As the years go by, we simplify language with use and trim out the extra bits. Excellent example, purely by accident - I said “extra” rather than “extraneous.”
I once read that spoken English sentances have become shorter and shorter as time goes on - I don’t remember where I read it, but I took it with a grain of salt because it started out mourning the loss of the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s time, and I do kinda doubt the average Elizabethan assistant pig-keeper was all about the iambic bit - but maybe the pentameter part is more plausible?
In other words, have spoken sentances gotten shorter, or is that merely a written phenomenon? And is this the kind of “second question in a thread” that will sink like a stone and that I’ll never remember to ask as a GQ of its own?
Back in the days when very few people could write at all, it might have been a form of boasting. “Well, look at how much I can write.” Also, writers used to be paid by the word, which is a great incentive to make it flowery and overly verbose.
The first rule of good write is to keep it simple.
No. Not at all. A “colophon” is a publisher’s mark, and the word also seems to be used on some websites as an “about the author” kind of thing. I have nothing at all to do with Glo-Cheeze or AmeriLoaf, tasty as they may sound.
In Ken Burns’s Civil War epic, we hear letters written by soldiers to their loved ones, and while not flowery, they’re just a bit more formal and more elegant and more poignant than those of today’s soldier.
Well, I used to think that.
This morning, a column entitled, The Things They Wrote appeared in the New York Times. It consisted of excerpts from letters to loved ones, written by our military people who later died in Iraq. Here is a snippet from “an e-mail message to her cousin on his wedding day from Sgt. First Class Linda Ann Tarango-Griess, 33, of Sutton Neb., [who] was killed July 11, in Samarra by an improvised explosive device.”
‘…I am sorry I can’t be there to share in your day, but here I am in hopes that one day, these people will have the chance to be as happy as you. Just know that I AM with you…just close your eyes, place your hands over your heart, and you will feel me there.’
I disagree. Though the original passage is definitely ‘flowery’, I wouldn’t say it’s exactly equivalent to your version. For one thing it draws its own metaphor between a child dressing up a doll* and dressing up an empty idea with attractive words, and that comment is not reflected in the modified expression. Granted, one might not need to add that metaphor to make the desired point, but it does serve to reinforce what the author is saying.
Writing these days is used much more for business and technical purposes that it was in the old days. Back then people used it a lot more for interpersonal communication, memoirs, diaries and the like.
While watching Ken Burns’ PBS series about the Civil War I noticed the poetic slant of the letters written by “simple” people such as army privates and their families to each other.
Pennmanship seems to have been more a sorce of personal pride back then too.
No loss, though.
Peace,
mangeorge