by George Orwell
1946
from
GeorgeOrwell Website
Most people who bother with the matter at all
would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally
assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our
civilization is decadent and our language — so the argument runs — must
inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle
against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring
candles to electric light or hansom cabs to airplanes.
Underneath this lies
the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an
instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have
political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of
this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause,
reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an
intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he
feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because
he drinks.
It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English
language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish,
but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish
thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English,
especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation
and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.
If
one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think
clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the
fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern
of professional writers. I will come back to this presently, and I hope that
by that time the meaning of what I have said here will have become clearer.
Meanwhile, here are five specimens of the English language as it is now
habitually written.
These five passages have not been picked out because they are especially bad
— I could have quoted far worse if I had chosen — but because they
illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a
little below the average, but are fairly representative examples.
I number
them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:
-
I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the Milton who
once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century Shelley had not become, out of
an experience ever more bitter in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder
of that Jesuit sect which nothing could induce him to tolerate.
Professor Harold Laski (Essay in Freedom of Expression)
-
Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of
idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put
up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.
Professor Lancelot Hogben (Interglossia)
-
On the one side we have the free personality: by definition it is not
neurotic, for it has neither conflict nor dream. Its desires, such as they
are, are transparent, for they are just what institutional approval keeps in
the forefront of consciousness; another institutional pattern would alter
their number and intensity; there is little in them that is natural,
irreducible, or culturally dangerous. But on the other side, the social bond
itself is nothing but the mutual reflection of these self-secure
integrities. Recall the definition of love. Is not this the very picture of
a small academic? Where is there a place in this hall of mirrors for either
personality or fraternity?
Essay on psychology in Politics (New York)
-
All the ‘best people’ from the gentlemen's clubs, and all the frantic
fascist captains, united in common hatred of Socialism and bestial horror at
the rising tide of the mass revolutionary movement, have turned to acts of
provocation, to foul incendiarism, to medieval legends of poisoned wells, to
legalize their own destruction of proletarian organizations, and rouse the
agitated petty-bourgeoisie to chauvinistic fervor on behalf of the fight
against the revolutionary way out of the crisis.
Communist pamphlet
-
If a new spirit is to be infused into this old country, there is one
thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled, and that is the
humanization and galvanization of the B.B.C. Timidity here will bespeak
canker and atrophy of the soul. The heart of Britain may be sound and of
strong beat, for instance, but the British lion's roar at present is like
that of Bottom in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream — as gentle as any
sucking dove. A virile new Britain cannot continue indefinitely to be
traduced in the eyes or rather ears, of the world by the effete languors of
Langham Place, brazenly masquerading as ‘standard English’. When the Voice
of Britain is heard at nine o'clock, better far and infinitely less
ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish,
inflated, inhibited, school-ma'amish arch braying of blameless bashful
mewing maidens!
Letter in Tribune
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from
avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them.
The first is
staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has
a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or
he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This
mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked
characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of
political writing.
As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts
into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are
not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of
their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the
sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
I list below, with notes and
examples, various of the tricks by means of which the work of
prose-construction is habitually dodged.
-
DYING METAPHORS.
A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a
visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically ‘dead’
(e. g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and
can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two
classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all
evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of
inventing phrases for themselves.
Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up
the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to
shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill,
fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles’ heel, swan
song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning
(what is a ‘rift’, for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently
mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.
Some metaphors now current have been twisted out of their original meaning
without those who use them even being aware of the fact. For example, toe
the line is sometimes written as tow the line.
Another example is the hammer
and the anvil, now always used with the implication that the anvil gets the
worst of it. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer,
never the other way about: a writer who stopped to think what he was saying
would avoid perverting the original phrase.
-
OPERATORS OR VERBAL FALSE LIMBS.
These save the trouble of picking out
appropriate verbs and nouns, and at the same time pad each sentence with
extra syllables which give it an appearance of symmetry. Characteristic
phrases are render inoperative, militate against, make contact with, be
subjected to, give rise to, give grounds for, have the effect of, play a
leading part (role) in, make itself felt, take effect, exhibit a tendency
to, serve the purpose of, etc., etc.
The keynote is the elimination of
simple verbs. Instead of being a single word, such as break, stop, spoil,
mend, kill, a verb becomes a phrase, made up of a noun or adjective tacked
on to some general-purpose verb such as prove, serve, form, play, render. In
addition, the passive voice is wherever possible used in preference to the
active, and noun constructions are used instead of gerunds (by examination
of instead of by examining).
The range of verbs is further cut down by means
of the -ize and de- formations, and the banal statements are given an
appearance of profundity by means of the not un- formation.
Simple
conjunctions and prepositions are replaced by such phrases as with respect
to, having regard to, the fact that, by dint of, in view of, in the
interests of, on the hypothesis that; and the ends of sentences are saved by
anticlimax by such resounding commonplaces as greatly to be desired, cannot
be left out of account, a development to be expected in the near future,
deserving of serious consideration, brought to a satisfactory conclusion,
and so on and so forth.
-
PRETENTIOUS DICTION.
Words like phenomenon, element, individual (as noun),
objective, categorical, effective, virtual, basic, primary, promote,
constitute, exhibit, exploit, utilize, eliminate, liquidate, are used to
dress up a simple statement and give an air of scientific impartiality to
biased judgments. Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic,
unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are
used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing
that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic color, its
characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident,
sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.
Foreign words and
expressions such as cul de sac, ancien regime, deus ex machina,
mutatis
mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltung, weltanschauung, are used to give an
air of culture and elegance.
Except for the useful abbreviations i. e., e.
g. and etc., there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign
phrases now current in the English language. Bad writers, and especially
scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted
by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and
unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous,
deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain
ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers(1).
The jargon peculiar to Marxist
writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey,
flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated
from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is
to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary,
the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize,
impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up
the English words that will cover one's meaning. The result, in general, is
an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
-
MEANINGLESS WORDS.
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art
criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages
which are almost completely lacking in meaning(2). Words like romantic,
plastic, values, human, dead, sentimental, natural, vitality, as used in art
criticism, are strictly meaningless, in the sense that they not only do not
point to any discoverable object, but are hardly ever expected to do so by
the reader.
When one critic writes, ‘The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work
is its living quality’, while another writes, ‘The immediately striking
thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness’, the reader accepts this
as a simple difference opinion. If words like black and white were involved,
instead of the jargon words dead and living, he would see at once that
language was being used in an improper way. Many political words are
similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies ‘something not desirable’.
The words democracy, socialism,
freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different
meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word
like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to
make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when
we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders
of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they
might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is,
the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his
hearer to think he means something quite different.
Statements like Marshal
Petain was a true patriot, The Soviet press is the freest in the world,
The
Catholic Church is opposed to persecution, are almost always made with
intent to deceive. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more
or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive,
reactionary, bourgeois, equality.
Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give
another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must
of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good
English into modern English of the worst sort.
Here is a well-known verse
from Ecclesiastes:
I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the
battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men
of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance
happeneth to them all.
Here it is in modern English:
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion
that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be
commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the
unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
This is a parody, but not a very gross one.
Exhibit (3) above, for instance,
contains several patches of the same kind of English. It will be seen that I
have not made a full translation. The beginning and ending of the sentence
follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle the concrete
illustrations — race, battle, bread — dissolve into the vague phrases
‘success or failure in competitive activities’.
This had to be so, because
no modern writer of the kind I am discussing — no one capable of using
phrases like ‘objective considerations of contemporary phenomena’ — would
ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way. The whole
tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness. Now analyze these two
sentences a little more closely.
The first contains forty-nine words but
only sixty syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life. The
second contains thirty-eight words of ninety syllables: eighteen of those
words are from Latin roots, and one from Greek. The first sentence contains
six vivid images, and only one phrase (‘time and chance’) that could be
called vague. The second contains not a single fresh, arresting phrase, and
in spite of its ninety syllables it gives only a shortened version of the
meaning contained in the first. Yet without a doubt it is the second kind of
sentence that is gaining ground in modern English.
I do not want to
exaggerate. This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of
simplicity will occur here and there in the worst-written page. Still, if
you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human
fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than
to the one from Ecclesiastes.
As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in
picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in
order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long
strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and
making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
The attraction of this way
of writing is that it is easy. It is easier — even quicker, once you have
the habit — to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that
than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have
to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms
of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be
more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry — when you are
dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech — it is
natural to fall into a pretentious, Latinized style.
Tags like a
consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to
which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming
down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes, and idioms, you save
much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for
your reader but for yourself.
This is the significance of mixed metaphors.
The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images
clash — as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is
thrown into the melting pot — it can be taken as certain that the writer is
not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is
not really thinking.
Look again at the examples I gave at the beginning of
this essay.
Professor Laski (1) uses five negatives in fifty three words.
One of these is superfluous, making nonsense of the whole passage, and in
addition there is the slip — alien for akin — making further nonsense, and
several avoidable pieces of clumsiness which increase the general vagueness.
Professor Hogben (2) plays ducks and drakes with a battery which is able to
write prescriptions, and, while disapproving of the everyday phrase put up
with, is unwilling to look egregious up in the dictionary and see what it
means;
(3), if one takes an uncharitable attitude towards it, is simply
meaningless: probably one could work out its intended meaning by reading the
whole of the article in which it occurs.
In (4), the writer knows more or
less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him
like tea leaves blocking a sink.
In (5), words and meaning have almost
parted company. People who write in this manner usually have a general
emotional meaning — they dislike one thing and want to express solidarity
with another — but they are not interested in the detail of what they are
saying.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask
himself at least four questions, thus:
-
What am I trying to say?
-
What words
will express it?
-
What image or idiom will make it clearer?
-
Is this image
fresh enough to have an effect?
-
And he will probably ask himself two more:
Could I put it more shortly?
-
Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?
But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by
simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come
crowding in. The will construct your sentences for you — even think your
thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the
important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the
debasement of language becomes clear.
In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where
it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of
rebel, expressing his private opinions and not a ‘party line’. Orthodoxy, of
whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style. The political
dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White
papers and the speeches of undersecretaries do, of course, vary from party
to party, but they are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a
fresh, vivid, homemade turn of speech.
When one watches some tired hack on
the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial,
atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world,
stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not
watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly
becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles
and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
And
this is not altogether fanciful.
A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology
has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The
appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not
involved, as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the
speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over
again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one
utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if
not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the
indefensible.
Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the
Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan,
can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most
people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the
political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of
euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Defenseless villages
are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside,
the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets:
this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms
and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is
called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers.
People are
imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent
to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of
unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things
without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some
comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism.
He cannot
say outright,
‘I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good
results by doing so’.
Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features
which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree
that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an
unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which
the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply
justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words
falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up
all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
When
there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it
were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish
spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of
politics’. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of
lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general
atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
I should expect to find — this is a
guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German,
Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or
fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad
usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and
do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some
ways very convenient. Phrases like a not unjustifiable assumption, leaves
much to be desired, would serve no good purpose, a consideration which we
should do well to bear in mind, are a continuous temptation, a packet of
aspirins always at one's elbow.
Look back through this essay, and for
certain you will find that I have again and again committed the very faults
I am protesting against. By this morning's post I have received a pamphlet
dealing with conditions in Germany. The author tells me that he ‘felt
impelled’ to write it.
I open it at random, and here is almost the first
sentence I see:
‘[The Allies] have an opportunity not only of achieving a
radical transformation of Germany's social and political structure in such a
way as to avoid a nationalistic reaction in Germany itself, but at the same
time of laying the foundations of a co-operative and unified Europe.’
You
see, he ‘feels impelled’ to write — feels, presumably, that he has something
new to say — and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle,
group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern. This
invasion of one's mind by ready-made phrases (lay the foundations, achieve a
radical transformation) can only be prevented if one is constantly on guard
against them, and every such phrase anaesthetizes a portion of one's brain.
I said earlier that the decadence of our language is probably curable. Those
who deny this would argue, if they produced an argument at all, that
language merely reflects existing social conditions, and that we cannot
influence its development by any direct tinkering with words and
constructions. So far as the general tone or spirit of a language goes, this
may be true, but it is not true in detail.
Silly words and expressions have
often disappeared, not through any evolutionary process but owing to the
conscious action of a minority. Two recent examples were explore every
avenue and leave no stone unturned, which were killed by the jeers of a few
journalists.
There is a long list of flyblown metaphors which could
similarly be got rid of if enough people would interest themselves in the
job; and it should also be possible to laugh the not un-formation out of
existence (3), to reduce the amount of Latin and Greek in the average
sentence, to drive out foreign phrases and strayed scientific words, and, in
general, to make pretentiousness unfashionable.
But all these are minor
points.
The defense of the English language implies more than this, and
perhaps it is best to start by saying what it does not imply.
To begin with it has nothing to do with archaism, with the salvaging of
obsolete words and turns of speech, or with the setting up of a ‘standard
English’ which must never be departed from. On the contrary, it is
especially concerned with the scrapping of every word or idiom which has
outworn its usefulness. It has nothing to do with correct grammar and
syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear,
or with the avoidance of Americanisms, or with having what is called a ‘good
prose style’.
On the other hand, it is not concerned with fake simplicity
and the attempt to make written English colloquial. Nor does it even imply
in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one, though it does
imply using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the
other way around.
In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is
surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think
wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been
visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem
to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use
words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it,
the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the
expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.
Probably it is better to
put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as
one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not
simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then
switch round and decide what impressions one's words are likely to make on
another person.
This last effort of the mind cuts out all stale or mixed
images, all prefabricated phrases, needless repetitions, and humbug and
vagueness generally. But one can often be in doubt about the effect of a
word or a phrase, and one needs rules that one can rely on when instinct
fails.
I think the following rules will cover most cases:
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used
to seeing in print.
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
Never use the passive where you can use the active.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can
think of an everyday English equivalent.
Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
These rules sound elementary, and so they are, but they demand a deep change
of attitude in anyone who has grown used to writing in the style now
fashionable. One could keep all of them and still write bad English, but one
could not write the kind of stuff that I quoted in those five specimens at
the beginning of this article.
I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely
language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or
preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that
all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for
advocating a kind of political quietism.
Since you don't know what Fascism
is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such
absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political
chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably
bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify
your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.
You cannot
speak any of the necessary dialects, and when you make a stupid remark its
stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself. Political language — and with
variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to
Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
One cannot change this
all in a moment, but one can at least change one's own habits, and from time
to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and
useless phrase — some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid
test, veritable inferno, or other lump of verbal refuse — into the dustbin
where it belongs.
References
1) An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English
flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek
ones, snapdragon becoming antirrhinum, forget-me-not becoming myosotis, etc.
It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is
probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a
vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific.
2) Example: ‘Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely
Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion,
continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative ginting at a
cruel, an inexorably selene timelessness... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming
at simple bull's-eyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and
through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet
of resignation’. (Poetry Quarterly.)
3) One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this
sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not
ungreen field.
THE END