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what I find very interesting is that many of your highlighted words seem quite ordinary to me, though there are some real doozies in there...Quote:The pretentiousness adumbrated in that list emerges with febrile ostentation
heh.
formerly known as etaoin...
Quote:The pretentiousness adumbrated in that list emerges with febrile ostentation
That is tautological, IMO.
Here's a book, jothan, that might make you acceptably erudite if you think that you should really bother...
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
New York Times Book Review (in part)
"...I am myself familiar with the reviewing cliché, from both ends of the business, so I say deliberately that Updike’s scope is rather breathtaking (from Isaac Babel straight to James Thurber on successive pages), and I add that he seems almost incapable of writing badly. When I do not know the subject well — as in his finely illustrated art reviews of Bruegel [Hi, BranShea :)], Dürer and Goya — I learn much from what Updike has to impart. When he considers an author I love, like Proust or Czeslaw Milosz, I often find myself appreciating familiar things in a new way. I enjoy the little feuilletons he appends, for example on the 10 greatest moments of the American libido. And I admire the way he can construct a classical sentence that makes an abrupt, useful turn to the American demotic:
“Having patiently read both versions” of Philip Larkin’s “Collected Poems,” “this reviewer believes that the second, chastened version, confining itself to the four trade volumes Larkin supervised and the uncollected poems ‘published in other places,’ does give the verse itself a better shake.”
This appears in one of the best long treatments of Larkin’s poetry I have ever read. Those of us who adore this work have a tendency to feel personally addressed by it and to resent any other commentators as interlopers. Updike seems almost to know what we are thinking. It’s of interest, also, that his own vestigial Christianity — or do I mean surviving attachment to Christianity? — proves on other pages to be not dissimilar to Larkin’s own synthesis, in “Aubade” and in “Church Going,” of a bleak materialism fused with an admiration for the liturgy and the architecture.
..."
On second thought just reading the New York Times book reviews of this book should enable you to converse wildly and wrongly with the intellectual chic.
Last edited by themilum; 12/14/07 11:54 AM.
OP Originally Posted By: HydraQuote:The pretentiousness adumbrated in that list emerges with febrile ostentation
That is tautological, IMO.
It makes more sense if I supply the whole sentence:
The pretentiousness adumbrated in that list emerges with febrile ostentation in “The Gulf of Time,” Mr. Lapham’s lengthy “Preamble.”
It doesn't exactly deserve the label tautological because the pretentiousness in the list is, apparently, only adumbrated; that in the preamble, on the contrary, is febrile.
Last edited by jotham; 12/14/07 12:50 PM.
OP Originally Posted By: themilumHere's a book, jothan, that might make you acceptably erudite if you think that you should really bother...
Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
New York Times Book Review (in part)
Thanks for the suggestion; I'll look into that. I noticed John Updike wrote one of the articles displayed on The New York Review of Books website.Originally Posted By: themilumOn second thought just reading the New York Times book reviews of this book should enable you to converse wildly and wrongly with the intellectual chic.
Well, the subject matter shouldn't matter too much; just as long as the vocabulary is handled effectively: I learn from their writing technique rather than their ideology.
The problem with studying mere lists or the dictionary is I'm not creative enough to think of appropriate contexts to use them. I'd like these words to be right at my fingertips so they can be effortlessly and spontaneously employed when auspicious occasions arise.
Last edited by jotham; 12/15/07 05:22 AM.
Quote:Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
Thanks for the title, themilum. I really want to see how Updike revieuws Breugel. For the subject matter and for the writing technique. (Our library may have it.)
Last edited by BranShea; 12/14/07 07:09 PM.
Quote:It makes more sense if I supply the whole sentence:
You're right. That's okay.
Hence, contextomy is bad.
OP Here's an interesting article in The Guardian:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2227650,00.htmlQuote:From albedo to zugunruhe
How often do you bother looking up an unfamiliar word? Should writers make us reach for our dictionaries? Four years ago, James Meek vowed to learn every alien word he encountered, and discovered poetry in obscurity.
Last edited by jotham; 12/21/07 09:25 AM.
If for every word you do not completely understand you would reach for your dictionary, there would be little enjoyment in reading a book in a foreign language. Only when an unknown word is the key to understanding the content, the dictionary is needed. To make side notes of intriguing unknown words and look them up afterwards is fun.
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