12.13.08

Pulsed and re-pulsed

Posted in punctuation, redundancy, verbal indiscretions, wordiness, write tight at 10:22 am by Bill Brohaugh

OK, so I’ve been away a bit. My thanks to the folks who wrote to check my pulse. Still pulsing, I’m happy to report, but without the boil about the language I was able to work up in recent months. I try to blame it on a quieter media season with the election and its bloviations over, but in all honesty I just got exceedingly busy in other aspects of this thing we call life.

But the blood-boil level perked up a bit yesterday when I saw this news story about the unrest in Greece:

Terrified workers in banks along Athens’ central Syntagma Square watched in fear as protesters shattered windows just replaced days ago after being damaged in the worst riots Greece has experienced in decades.

Here I would campaign for Athens’s to indicate that Syntagma Square is located in singular Athens and not a group of communities each named Athen. But there’s little boil factor in that. And I strongly suggest positioning the word just before the concept it truly modifies—”days ago”—but, again, a little blood percolation, but no boil yet. Then there’s “workers in banks.” Were they, say, construction workers who just happened to be in the banks cashing their paychecks? I suspect that they were instead “bank workers”—a clearer, shorter, more direct phrasing. Again, pulse quickened, but the little platelets are still floating around in conditions under 212 degrees.

The vascular steam engine revs up around mid-sentence. Imagine this Write Tight boy’s surprise to learn that “terrified workers” watched “in fear.” Not only can that latter phrase be lopped off, it must be. This description is redundant, as terror is (last I heard) intense fear, but redundancy is the lesser of the two sins the sentence commits. “In fear” doesn’t merely repeat; it deflates. Terrified workers become merely fearful workers in the space of a dozen or so syllables.

So, to reassure my kind friends who checked in on me, the pulse is still there. And so is the re-pulse.

Permalink