UD is a major fan of Robert Zaretsky, a history professor at the University of Houston. She found his remarks on Christopher Hitchens, religion, and death to be among the most thoughtful his illness inspired.

Zaretsky’s recent remarks on France’s disgraced chief rabbi are similarly thoughtful; they are the only ones I’ve come across which put this farcically hypocritical man in a larger French perspective.

There’s one paragraph, though, whose prose I’d futz with a bit.

There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.

On one level, these are great sentences, the kind of packed-with-detail sentences we try to get our students to write. So there’s no Scathing Online Schoolmarm here, none of my complaining about bad writing…

On the other hand, there’s room for improvement, no? I’d first take out some filler, some unnecessary words that weaken the punch of the sentence:

‘There is no good time to steal other people’s words and thoughts, of course, but now is an especially bad time to do so. The political scene in France has grown toxic, thanks in part to a series of corruption scandals on both the right, involving former president Nicolas Sarkozy[‘s] and the illicit funding of his party, and the left, with the former budget minister Jerome Cahuzac trapped in a series of [note redundant use of this word] lies about Swiss bank accounts. President Francois Hollande’s floundering government, contested in the streets by conservative and reactionary movements, has been unable to reverse either the withering of the economy or the burgeoning of unemployment, much less halt the European Union’s politics of austerity.’

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In the second sentence, the problem is excessive and sort of clashing ings: floundering, withering, burgeoning… And I don’t know about you, but often when I see floudering I waste time pondering whether it shouldn’t be foundering … Which isn’t a criticism. Everyone gets to use the English language. And in fact assuming you believe Hollande will be able to keep his government up and running, floudering is right and foundering is wrong…

On withering and burgeoning, I actually think the simple use of fall and rise would be better, even though this seems counter-intuitive, since we’re always supposed to be looking for interesting, dramatic, fresh ways to say things. Yet simplicity in cases like this one is arguably better, since rise and fall keep me focused on the content of the statement, while withering and burgeoning are giving me mixed metaphor palpitations (they’re not really a case of mixed metaphor, but I’m still getting the palpitations).

I suspect the proximity of all these theatrical words (withering floundering burgeoning) is playing into my palpitations…

Nor does it help that after these perhaps too physical words we end with a very abstract phrase: politics of austerity.

So – In no way a bad paragraph, but I guess a bit jumbled between abstract and concrete words.