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Dean
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Reading for the 2nd time
read in December 2012
“if you say, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way – e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level’ – and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.”
― The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase
― The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted invention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander for ever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop.”
― The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
― The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
“I don’t know . . . Well, there’s a lot of things I haven’t had time to do. Fishing, for instance. I’ve always liked fishing. Maybe I’ll start reading books, always meant to. Guess I’ll take it easy now. Guess I’ll go fishing. There’s some nice places down in Arizona, where it’s peaceful and quiet and you don’t have to see a human being for miles. . . .”
― Atlas Shrugged
― Atlas Shrugged
“If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you run into assholes all day, you're the asshole.”
―
―
“John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
― The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
― The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase
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Dean’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Dean’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
267 books
|
106 friends
620 books
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229 friends
1,483 books
|
320 friends
1,093 books
|
197 friends
841 books
|
9 friends
729 books
|
445 friends
265 books
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266 friends
1,078 books
|
207 friends
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