Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Especially if you’re a journalist, and especially if you’re referencing a very well-known legal principle, LOOK IT UP. Sheesh.
As to the particular subject matter of this typically INSANE story out of Texas, the state is invited to welcome a brand new city, established by the crazies who live there so they can be free to set their own demento rules. One thinks of the hare krishna cults establishing domains in places like Oregon back in the ‘nineties, until the lunatic excesses of their leaders drew the attention of the police.
The group currently in question is bible-thumping, gun-humping Torch of Freedom – pious shooters blasting their love of the lord 24/7.
Neighbors are seriously pissed (“We hear constant shooting. And when I say shooting, I’m not talking about a pistol or a shotgun. It’s a professional military-type shooting range and they were shooting high-powered rifles, essentially non-stop every day,” said Jim Schaefer, Gillespie County resident. “We cannot sit on our porch and enjoy the evening when they shoot. Sometimes they’ll shoot throughout the weekend.”), and, even though it’s absolutely berserko Texas, it looks as though local authorities also find Spewing for the Savior a bridge too far.
A writer for the local paper covering the Donna Adelson trial (the Adelsons seem to have worked together in some fashion to rid themselves of Dan Markel) is determined to raise this trashy tale all the way up to the level of Shakespearean tragedy. Repeatedly in his article, he compares the farkakte Adelsons to the Macbeths or something … But for starters you need to start out high and be brought low to have a tragedy, which is why although Bernie Madoff’s end in prison was awful, we do not say it was tragic cuz he started out every bit as scummy as he ended. I don’t think anyone said of Bernie’s demise O what a fall was there.
This is why when seeking literary analogues for America’s last all-engrossing blood-soaked family (the Murdaughs) we landed not on Shakespeare, but on William Faulkner, troubadour of trash.
The Adelson story is not The Tragedie of Charlie, Orthodontist of Boca. Yet “It was another day of Shakespearean Tragedy in Courtroom 3G in the State of Florida v. Donna Adelson… The facts and witnesses in this case have many twists and turns that are consistent with a well-written tragedy, Unfortunately, this is not fiction and the case is the result of a brutal and heinous murder. [SOS is not even going to bother with the illiteracy of the article.] In true Shakespearean fashion, Donna’s children could be the reason that she may spend the rest of her life in prison.”
Since Donna is closer to Linda Richman than King Lear, SOS is thinking Shakespearean analogies are non-starters.
First off, it’s got a good title, one that sardonically covers the theme of the piece: THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF PRINCE ANDREW.
Next, note how the writer’s basic point – that this new book has killed, not merely covered, the prince – establishes itself with morbid, hilarious, language, and sustains the morbidity. Will Lloyd doesn’t jump from death metaphors to other figurative stuff; he keeps it going, avoids having it get boring, and gives the piece depth and shapeliness. First paragraph:
Prince Andrew must be dead already. Biographies about breathing men have an inconclusive, interim quality. There are years to be lived: decisions to be made; books to be written; marriages to end; wars to be fought. The biographer whose subject is still with us apologetically and necessarily punts real judgements about them into the future. But in Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of The House of York, there is none of this sense of suspension, only the sound of the biographer’s axe falling, again and again, on the ragged bodies of Andrew Mountbatten–Windsor and Sarah Ferguson.
You know, not just the point that the book’s not a hit piece but an execution, but vivid and funny over the top (“axe” and “ragged” are very good) death knells. Second paragraph:
The first subheading in the book, clinically regarding Andrew when he is barely out of the crib, is called “Baby Grumpling”; the second, surveying his years at Heatherdown Prep School, is called “A Tiresome Little Shit”. According to Lownie, Andrew was a bad baby, who became a bad boy, who became a very bad man. We knew Andrew, following revelations about his relationship with the late child-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, was disgraced. Lownie shows us that the Duke’s predicament is even more funereal, a living death.
Laughed out loud on tiresome little shit. Funereal, a living death, keeps us on the not a toff but a stiff track.
The book
reads as a nihilistic satire of Royal biography itself. The typical Windsorist book that parades birth, boarding, marriage, military service, foreign excursions, second marriage and so on, often written in threatless prose amidst an atmosphere of flummery, is not Lownie’s style. Less a biographer than a mortician, he has delivered a 456-page obituary for the Duke and Duchess of York.
Nihilistic, Windsorist, threatless – these are fun, less familiar words… the phrase amidst an atmosphere of flummery has a pseudo fancy schmancy something to it which in itself reads as a nihilistic satire of royal pretensions. And then again the death thing. Look at that last sentence. It’s beautiful.
And then: The biographer’s three works on three royals represent a clutch of barrel bombs dropped on the Crown. “Clutch” is terrific; but notice he’s also produced some nice alliteration: clutch and Crown, barrel and bombs, with dropped and bombs assonantal.
“Fergie” as they call her, was a redtop hounded by the Redtops. Fun. Meghan Markle fled to Montecito. More fun. This is lively, playful, writing. The Ferguson family home, the balefully named “Dummer Down” … Who knew? And more fun alliteration!
There’s sly stuff, such as the tiny killing clause in the middle of this sentence: The Prince was lionised by the press that would later become, besides himself, the major antagonist of his life. There are wonderful similes: Lownie moves like a basking shark through newspaper archives.
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To be sure, royalty has long been the ultimate satire target — all the more reason why doing it well deserves recognition.
‘Trump’s Rewriting of Reality on Jobs Numbers is Chilling, but it Could Backfire‘
‘Manufacturing could become a strong element of Wyoming’s economy, complimenting energy, agriculture and other sectors.‘
Scathing Online Schoolmarm notes a striking connection between weapons laxity and bad language skills.
First, keep this in mind. “South Carolina has weak gun laws—missing the vast majority of the 50 key policies—and suffers one of the highest rates of gun homicides in the nation.”
Arguably less important than – what’d that lady say down there? – a bloodbath every day – a grasp of grammar/vocabulary nonetheless counts for something, SOS would urge, and as she …. rifles … through articles about guns she is often struck by a general need for correction by, well, SOS, so let’s …. take aim at some of this. Let’s unload. Let’s choose some targets.
Like the journalists and spokespeople of li’l all shot up Lake City SC! A typical article in the local press — daily bloodbath bad, oughta do something — includes more than a few solecisms.
The police chief talks about a kiddie shooting off a gun at Walmart just t’other day. “That incident could have went extremely bad, extremely quick. It’s something that socks the conscience, that’s not something we want.”
SOS likes his use of “socks” – an unexpected, vivid, choice; socked in the gut, go for it. Socks and conscience have a nice assonance on the o.
Note that it’s almost the famous shocks the conscience – which the speaker might have meant, but in messing it up he came up with something better.
Could have went should be could have gone: A straightforward error. If you want to be prissy about it, badly would be better than bad but ain’t no big deal.
The journalist:
He says they are seeing a troubling trend called “straw purchases.” That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so. That person will then sell the gun to someone who cannot legally own or possess one.
What would an elitist at the NYT do with this same material? Fewer words, I hear you say. Subordination. Stuff that lets you combine in one or two sentences material that sounds redundant and slow-witted cuz like a kindergarten teacher you carefully separate it into short sentences. So something like this will be the NYT version:
Straw purchases are a troubling trend in which a legal purchaser sells a gun to an illegal.
Forty words versus sixteen! And note that the SC journalist even includes a thing that isn’t a sentence (That is where someone who legally can purchase a gun and does so.) This happens when you’re all tied up in verbiage and, in this case, forget to dump the “who.”
Back to the police chief.
“There’s no one single incident that you can point to that, in my opinion, there’s a it’s a gambit of things, and I think it starts with straw purchases.”
Now of course the journalist could clean a lot of this up with the use of ellipsis and [sic] and all – as a writer, you’re not duty-bound to record every stream of consciousness that flows out of a speaker. But the glaring error here is a gambit of things. The speaker meant gamut. One way to remember how to use gamut is with Dorothy Parker’s famous review of a theatrical performance:
“Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.”
Whoever published this headline could use it.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm Says:
To propitiate is to “win or regain the favor of (a god, spirit, or person) by doing something that pleases them: ‘the pagans thought it was important to propitiate the gods with sacrifices.'” Squint as hard as you like at Tennis World‘s use of it in my headline and you’re still not gonna get there.
SOS thinks the writer might have meant precipitate?
Not the world’s best headline.
Au contraire. We’re all poo-pooing the food here. We have no choice.
“I have known Bobby my whole life; we grew up together,” Caroline Kennedy wrote [ahead of RFK jr’s confirmation hearing]. “It’s no surprise that he keeps birds of prey as pets because he himself is a predator… [Through] the strength of his personality, [other family members followed Kennedy] down the path of drug addiction… His basement, his garage, his dorm room were the centers of the action where drugs were available, and he enjoyed showing off how he put baby chickens and mice in the blender to feed his hawks. It was often a perverse scene of despair and violence.”
She commended Kennedy for “pulling himself out of illness and disease” but lamented that “siblings and cousins who Bobby encouraged down the path of substance abuse suffered addiction, illness, and death while Bobby has gone on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life.”
Brava.
SOS says: She’s surprised to see the revert back mistake in the NYT. Just as the phrase chai tea is redundant, so all things that revert revert back, since the meaning of the word is to go back, to return. Chai (it means tea) does the job alone, and so does revert.
I mean, it’s not exactly a mistake; it’s just gauche, like saying irregardless.
And meanwhile, get a load of the incredibly convoluted latest iteration of a settlement with the opiate pushers Purdue/Sacklers. The litigation has been going on for years. We’ve covered in particular here the suffering state of West Virginia, as it dealt with insanely massive over-prescription of Oxy Contin. A disgusting tale.
SOS says: It’s not a mixed metaphor, but it’s certainly a muddle… To express her anger over the Bidens’ failure to visit her mother while she was in the hospital, Alexandra Pelosi packed every insult she could think of into a mess of a thing in which Lady Macbeth is enjoined to put on her big boy pants and take up football. If you want to complete an effective hit, you need aim and accuracy.
Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: I don’t think you need augur at; I think you only need augur. Also: Too much figurative language in here, clashing away: clean house, booted, seat.
You could also quibble with the repetition of experts and expertise.