Forging a stage to plunge into battle

George Orwell, Politics and the English Language:

Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

Strunk and White, The Elements of Style, from Section V, An approach to style:

Rule 18: Use figures of speech sparingly. … When you use metaphor, do not mix it up. That is, don’t start by calling something a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass.

From the Front page of Sunday’s New York Times:

Senator Barack Obama won a commanding victory over Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, forging a coalition of support among black and white voters in a contest that sets the stage for a state-by-state fight for the party’s presidential nomination.

In a bitter campaign here infused with discussions of race, Mr. Obama’s convincing victory puts him on equal footing with Mrs. Clinton —with two wins each in early-voting states — and gives him fresh momentum as the contest plunges into a nationwide battle over the next 10 days.

Metaphor, figure or speech and cliche tally:

“commanding victory”
“forging a coalition”
“sets the stage”
“fight”
“equal footing”
“fresh momentum”
“plunges into battle”

Revisiting Strunk and White

Re-reading “The Elements of Style” is like visiting with an old friend after a long, long absence.

All the endearing qualities, all the old bonds, come rushing back.

And, with the passage of the years, there’s so much to talk about with authors William Strunk and E.B. White. So much to be reminded of. That includes their assurance that it’s all right to end a sentence with a preposition — especially if it saves you from writing, “So much of which to be reminded.”

The book reminded me of how much I’ve wanted to share with kindred spirits my revulsion for the ubiquitous “robust.” Whom better than Strunk and White?

If there was ever a “Bush-ite” word, it is “robust.” It almost comes branded with the black mark of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. The word is all posture and no substance. “Mission Accomplished” was, and is, “robust.”

What kind of bust has Iraq been? A RO-BUST!

So it was that Strunk and White singled out “thrust,” which displays its own phoney muscle-flexing. To quote from page 61 of the third edition: “This showy noun, suggestive of power, hinting of sex, is the darling of executives, politicos and speech writers. Use it sparingly. Save it for specific applications.”

Exactly, and likewise with “robust.”

“The Elements of Style” is one gem after another.

One of my favorite passages explains how Lincoln got away with “Four score and seven years ago.”

I mean, REALLY! Talk about over-written.

And yet he did it, and White in the book’s concluding section, titled “An Approach to Style,” nails down why.

Noting that Lincoln was “flirting with disaster” when he wrote the phrase, White continues:

The president could have got into his sentence with plain “eighty-seven” — a saving of two words and less of a strain on the listeners’ powers of multiplication. But Lincoln’s ear must have told him to go ahead with four score and seven. By doing so, he achieved cadence while skirting the edge of fanciness. Suppose he had blundered over the line and written, “In the year of our Lord seventeen hundred and seventy-six.” His speech would have sustained a heavy blow. Or suppose he had settled on “eighty-seven.” In that case he would have got into his introductory sentence too quickly; the timing would have been bad.”

Lincoln’s choice of a beginning ensured that, contrary to what he said that day, we will long remember his short speech at the hallowed Gettysburg battleground.

Strunk and White’s well-chosen words have the same effect. We will long remember “The Elements of Style.”

Early morning with E.B. White

The other day both newspapers, The Oregonian and The New York Times, were late arriving on our driveway.

Or maybe I was early coming downstairs.

It doesn’t matter who or what was to blame; the result was the same. Sitting in my study, a cup of coffee warming my paws, I suddenly found myself without news.

Savor this moment, I thought. And I did.

Then I reached out to grab the first book that fell to hand from the bookshelf that crowds my maroon recliner.

I found myself clutching “Essays” by E.B. White and suddenly my day took on a decidedly different hue.

No Iraq, no George W. Bush, no Iowa campaigning, no teenage fatalities on rural highways, no stock market slides or Blazer losses.

Instead, I found myself back in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies with the transparent and congenial prose of the author of “Charlotte’s Web” and “Stuart Little.”

I nosed around among the essays reading unassuming yet beguiling leads.

“The Winter of the Great Snows” began: “Somebody told me the other day that a seagull won’t eat a smelt.”

“The Sea and the Wind that Blows” started: “Waking or sleeping, I dream of boats — usually of rather small boat under a slight press of sail.”

And “Riposte” began: “To come upon an article in the Times called ‘The Meaning of Brown Eggs” was an unexpected pleasure.”

Which takes me back to where I began — with White’s essays themselves presenting a pleasure and relief from what I expected to find in The Oregonian and The Times.

How far he took me from what we consider “news.” So much so that his offerings became the real news of the day. How could I have stayed informed without it?

How do I manage on all those days when the newspapers arrive “on time”?

Flying Alarm Clock meets E.B. White

So here I am leafing idly through the most recent Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue, a point of entry into the minds of those who think they have everything but are about to find out that they don’t.

For instance, they don’t have:

“THE WORLD’S SMALLEST INDOOR REMOTE-CONTROL HELICOPTER.” For what? Reconnaissance of those hard-to-see cobwebs perhaps.

“THE 75-MILE RANGE THUNDERSTORM DETECTOR.” A must-have for the deaf who can’t hear thunder beyond five miles and feel a real need to know. Then again, they could go on-line to check out the local weather, but that’s not nearly so much fun as one of these little cherry-red detectors, with, mind you, an AC adapter and hard carrying case. A mere $429.95. Cheap at the price.

“THE FLYING ALARM CLOCK.” Turns out the clock doesn’t actually fly; it just launches an honest-to-God rotor when the alarm goes off. Again, very useful if you are deaf (I know of what I speak, but can’t hear). Next? For the really unresponsive, thick-skinned sleeper, expect HS to come out with a clock that launches an inter-bedroom ballistic missile. And next, an anti-inter-bedroom-missile missile.

Related item, “THE RUNAWAY ALARM CLOCK.” Let the catalog tell the story: “This alarm clock rolls away and hides from you when you hit its snooze button, yet it still emits a random pattern of beeps and flashes….”

And finally, “THE LOST ITEM HOMING LOCATOR.” I can relate. With this one, the “memory challenged” attach a special receiver tag to keys, glasses, hearing aides and the handheld transmitter searches them out when they are, ahem, misplaced. Problem: what happens when you lose the handheld transmitter? It happens. Coming soon in the next Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue — “THE LOST HOMING LOCATOR LOCATOR.”

There’s a lot more. Eighty pages of a lot more.

And now the strange part. Stunned by the very weirdness of it all, I put down the catalogue and stagger off to bed, where I pick up E.B. White’s “The Second Tree from the Corner,” a 1954 compilation of his writings. This particular bed-side volume is a 1984 republication with a new introduction by White. Still, he’s writing his introduction 23 years ago, at the age of 84.

On page two of the introduction, White is writing about a woman who was arrested by a game warden for living in a pup tent pitched in the Maine woods. The authorities, here I quote White, “turned her over to a mental health institution, presumably because the tiny tent contained nothing much to suggest civilized life, not even a Hammacher Schlemmer catalogue in whose pages she would have learned of the many conveniences that are available today to any right-minded woman — a portable dry-ice maker, an ultra-sonic cool-mist humidifier, an English heated towel stand, an electronic wine guide, a digital alarm pillbox, an electric kitty litter box, an oversized electric heating pad, and a cordless electric peppermill. To the wardens the tent must have seemed bare indeed.”

White’s list left me doubly stunned.

And doubly perplexed. What happened to the woman? Do I need a Flying Alarm Clock?