Sunday, April 27, 2008

Some Notes on Diction

Over at Touchstone a discussion on the difference between enormous and enormity and what "begging the question" really means and why it might matter, summed up nicely like this:
But people who suspect the Spirit of the Age encourages loose thinking in one area to put his subjects in practice for the same in another are, I think, on to something. Those who are concerned with getting their grammar right are not necessarily obsessives or antiquarians. They may intuit that the mind in love with virtue, so willing to name sin and error, is in some way related to that which is uncomfortable with barbarism. To equate the two is a mistake--but not to relate them. The trick is in understanding the nature of the relation. (go to the blog here for the rest)

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