Normally I would save a link like this for my Poetic Lives Online column later tonight, but this deserves a story all its own. Geoff Nunberg of Language Log is talking about an odd book project: “The text of the book will consist of submissions from the Elementspublic of the first sentence of a yet-to-be published sequel of some well known book — A Tale of Three Cities, To Fricassee a Mockingbird; you get the picture.” Nunberg’s own submission, though, is a thing unto itself.
Nunberg has decided to go with a sequel to Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” with a bit of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style thrown in. Here’s an excerpt.
The Language Critick must console himself
With Dreams of lasting Life upon the Shelf;
For Fame, tho’ most inconstant in her Favor
To USAGE BOOKS, routinely grants a Waiver.
Few Men the slightest Memory retain
Of Edna Ferber, Thomas B. Costain,
Ernest K. Gann, or others once the Rage
With Readers in the Eisenhower Age.
Yet Fortune even now bestows her Smile,
On Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style,
Still teaching to new Dogs its antique Tricks,
At Amazon.com Rank 206.
Such beauty. It is to weep.
One response
If you take into account the (not so well-known) fact that no two writers write the same and in the same respect no two readers have the same taste then a critic’s word is meaningless to the majority of the seven hundred million people wo use the English language to read by.
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