Source: Enemies of Promise (1938), Part 1: Predicament, Ch. 3: The Challenge to the Mandarins (p. 17-18)
Context: The Mandarin style at its best yields the richest and most complete expression of the English language. It is the diction of Donne, Browne, Addison, Johnson, Gibbon, de Quincey, Landor, Carlyle and Ruskin as opposed to that of Bunyan, Dryden, Locke, Defoe, Cowper, Cobbett, Hazlitt, Southey and Newman. It is characterized by long sentences with many dependent clauses, by the use of the subjunctive and conditional, by exclamations and interjections, quotations, allusions, metaphors, long images, Latin terminology, subtlety and conceits. Its cardinal assumption is that neither the writer nor the reader is in a hurry, that both are possessed of a classical education and a private income. It is Ciceronian English.
“[T]he effects of general change [in literature] are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in the transformation of the most ordinary workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete.”
"Good Sports & Bad", p. 335; originally published in The New York Review of Books (1995-03-02)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)
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Stephen Jay Gould 274
American evolutionary biologist 1941–2002Related quotes
Preface to the Revised Edition (October, 1906)
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906)
Interview with William Warren Bartley, cited in — [Bartley, William Warren, w:William Warren Bartley, Werner Erhard: the Transformation of a Man: the Founding of est, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc., 1978, New York, 157, 0-517-53502-5]
Source: The Doctrine of the Mean
Introduction: What is Literature?, p. 2
1980s, Literary Theory: An Introduction (1983)
Context: Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech. If you approach me at a bus stop and murmur "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," then I am instantly aware that I am in the presence of the literary.
“Jixiao Xinshu (New Book Recording Effective Techniques) exists in two editions, the first (c.”
1560) had 18 chapters, and the later addition (1584), re-edited with new material had 14.
Jixiao Xinshu (1560; 1584)
Source: Impressionist Painting: its genesis and development. (1904), p. 1: Ch. 1. The evolution of the impressionistic idea.
The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (1993)
p, 125
How Plants are Trained to Work for Man (1921) Vol. 5 Gardening