Bad writing is so commonplace in my life that I usually just shrug it off. Most of my reading, after all, is journalism, i.e. items generally cranked out under heavy deadline pressure by lightly-educated mediocrities, who get precious little incentive to do better, whether in cash, esprit de corps, or editorial whip-cracking.
Nor are winged words exactly flying from the keyboards of other writers today. From ivory-tower theorists (yawn) to corporate shills (shaddup!) to best-selling fictioneers (good luck abolishing reality, dreamers), the vast herd seems to lumber along in linguistic lockstep, stoically and unheroically, as if they were all ordinary shmoes and workaday wage-slaves trudging down some well-worn path to wherever. Only their degree of trite expression differs. If one or two among them do manage to transcend the banal norm, it is only because they were bitten by a radioactive poet and/or have a freakish amount of fire in the belly. The rest are just marking time. But hey, what were you expecting?C'est la vie.
And yet, and yet. Despite taking the chattering classes with the above grain of salt, on many a not-so-rare occasion some extra-horrible specimen of mangled language smacks me upside the head. and my sang-froid dissolves as I mutter dark profanities about morons and the goddamn pathetic education system.
The impetus for my latest outburst is, unsurprisingly, some newsprint from the heaps, specifically...
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Composus interruptus again...
