The Writer’s Art /ByJamesJ. Kilpatrick
End that interminable sentence
The story has been told many times before, but it makes a useful point and will always be new to someone.
Once upon a time there was a cub reporter, fresh out of journalism school, who was addicted to the sentence interminable. This was largely owing to his childhood, for he had an older sister and a younger brother who suffered from the same affliction. This was the rule at the dinner tables of their nonage: If you take a breath, you’ve lost the floor.
In time, the lad went to work under a fire-breathing ogre named Charles Henry Hamilton. This ogre was the city editor of a newspaper in Richmond-on-the-James, Va. Our youthful hero had been at work for barely a week before he received a message from the dragon. The missive read: “Mr. Kilpatrick: Those interesting objects are called periods. They are formed by a key on the bottom row of your typewriter. Kindly put these to immediate use.”
Thus admonished, our fledgling scribe curbed his addiction, more or less, and grew up to fight the sentence interminable with the sword of relative brevity. It became his custom to award a prize annually for the most long-winded sentence by a practicing journalist in the United States and its colonies. Every nomination must be in the form of a published sentence of at least 50 words.
This silver-plated, hand-engraved, historically significant flyswatter for 2008 goes to columnist George F. Will, whose winning entry appeared in November. It reads as follows:
“America can’t have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans — whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm — and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called ‘the private sector’ has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be ‘spread around.’ ”
Constant readers should draw no conclusions. Long sentences are not always indigestible. Gibbon served up hundreds of them in the “Decline and Fall.” In our own time, Faulkner often went on and on. The writer who consciously, deliberately writes down to his imagined readers will not be writing professionally for long.
On to unfinished business! A couple of weeks ago, I quoted a columnist in the Washington Post who noted that teenage pregnancy rates in the Netherlands are “six times lower” than they are here. The statistic sounded bogus to my uneducated ear, so I asked readers for help. From Buffalo to Seattle, they responded in droves.
Now I can tell you that, statistically speaking, there is no such thing as “six times lower.” Lewis Guignard of Crouse, N. C., was the first to reply. He writes: “ ‘Six times’ cannot possibly be lower; it is a multiplier. ‘One-sixth as much’ would be lower. More exactly, ‘Teenage pregnancy rates are six times higher in the U. S. than in the Netherlands,’ or, conversely, ‘Teenage pregnancy rates in the Netherlands are one-sixth the rate in the
U. S.’ ”
I shall never mess with fractions again. We
press on.
Readers are invited to send dated citations of usage to James J. Kilpatrick in care of this newspaper. His e-mail address is kilpatjj@aol.com Universal Press Syndicate
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