Thursday 31 January 2019

The words "are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons, and presently sent spinning, lovely, iridescent, and meaningless into the wild, blue heaven of prose." #QotD


"The result is...a very special vocabulary in which words come to transcend their exact and customary meanings -- in which, in a sense, they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons, and presently sent spinning, lovely, iridescent, and meaningless into the wild, blue heaven of...prose."
 ~ Wolcott Gibbs, quoted in Strunk and White's Elements of Style  on the pretentious vocabularies used in courtrooms, boardrooms, government reports and spin -- nonsense words and phrases like "step change," "deep dive," "trickle-down," "learnings," and now "recalibration."
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