Luan Ngo had yesterday's
Letter of the Day in the
Toronto Star. Ngo berates Canadians for our ignorance of our parliamentary system, and I'm afraid I can't really disagree. But then things get weird:
"Rather than being articulate and passionate debaters, these callers sound like a bunch of bubbling baboons. What is more concerning than the lack of nouns and pronouns in their sentences is how many people believe that our political system mirrors that of the U.S."
Is this an utter lack or just a mild deficiency? Is it a mere application of William Strunk's exhortation to omit needless words, or have we gone beyond this to omitting needful words as well? Or perhaps we've used the nouns, but just not IN sentences, something like this:
The has no trying to usurp (coalition, right, power).
I couldn't turn up any transcripts of recent radio phone in shows, so I went to the Toronto Sun's
Letters to the editor, but even there there seemed to be nouns in all the right places.
Wow, That's one bad example of linguification if I ever saw one!
ReplyDeleteThat reminds me of a book I read last year that contained this gem:
ReplyDelete"I want you to keep an eye on that one. Billy Manolo. Works at the yacht club. Things have been missing. Manager had to dress him down last week, threatened to fire him if things don't improve. Boy is a hoodlum. No good."
Theodosia stifled a grin and wondered if Booth Crowley's sentences were always this staccato and devoid of nouns and prepositions.
Yes, minus a few subjects and determiners, but hardly devoid of nouns and pronouns. Hey, it's all the same, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteToday, the less you say the better, maybe nouns just carry too much information, more than the speaker wants to present...
ReplyDeleteJay