#lanham

RAYMOND CHANDLER once remarked that 'American is an ill-at-ease language.' What makes you at ease with your language is liking it for its own sake, and this we have never done. Words were, like everything else, to be used and thrown away. At their best, they ought to evaporate entirely, constitute the ideal transparent medium for meaning. Start to look at words just for pleasure and you're a sissy, a poet. Not surprisingly, this tradition of see-through language has not left us especially good at analyzing prose. We are in fact, English teachers included, wonderfully inept at describing the 'good writing' we all say we cherish. We don't know what to look for, nor what to call it when it trips us up. And so, mostly, we don't look at all. When we do, nine times in ten it is only to make sure we've been correct, written 'good English,' no spelling errors showing, no pronoun references unzipped, no modifiers dangling. If everything seems o.k., if we've come smiling from the world's great verbal snare uncaught, there's an end to it. What else can you say?

army dreamers - Lanham / Creator