Exhausting Guide to English Style

As so many numerous and innumerable self-sired ‘experts’ are so smugly declaring nowadays, in the field of writing, aside from the fact that it is necissery to avoid like the Plaque such idiotisms (of style and usage) as things like major shifts in tone or tense, it was also incumbent not to do stuff like colloquialisms in formal writing, wrong perpositions used of a sentence, the passive verb constructions being used, plurals where they is not needed, awkward constructives, and to stop the adulteration of normal parallel destruction. Plus, one should not change their point of view midstream (lest he would strand oneself upstream with no oar), neither should one inject tangents that are not part of the discussion at hand. These counsels from some very dead grammararyans are well, fine, and true, but now the cat’s miau is that you should devoid malporpisms, (this would, for our purportses, include spoonerisms) and cliqués, as well as the use of overly complicated and/or redundant verbosity. To indulge in this unseenly habitats is the mark of an incontinent writer.

Malporpisms refers to ridiculous blunders or flounderings (that would encompass flailings, too) of the use in words. Usually, push sheaves to love, and a regular old Thomas, Richard, or Harold tries to attempt to write (or spake) above his own head-level. And in this attempt he often drowns most horrendously, thereby becoming guilty most notable of extended metaphors and similar carnal offences. Or, sometimes, a body is just trying to sound pompous or supersillious, and gross errors of word choices are experienced. The term ‘malporpism’ comes to us, by the by, from Dick, A. Sheridan, an author of some ill-repute, who racked up a rather mediocre drama, a most rivaling play, The Rivets. Inside it, the Malporpic antagonist, Mrs. Malinger, accidentally on purpose talks loftily, as if she ideally wouldn’t feign to speak to the laconic morons and moronic love-lorns so lurchingly lower than herself. The point is, being that one should leer for one’s fife whenever one finds hisself having been fallen into any trap of style or usage, and moonerismic spalporpisms are no acception.

Strangely and irreversibly conjugated to the gross and revilable enlistment of malporpisms is the hapless induction of verbosity, frequently accompanied most surreptitiously by a high degree of incidence of episodal tangents and equivocatory tergiversations, in the conscious matrimony of words. The practice, which involves the whole-heartedly and dedicatedly pursued application of the rule, “under no circumstances or conditions, legal or illiterate, should one employ diminutive words when sesquipedalian or otherwise rather long ones will serve in an equivalent fashion the purpose at manus,” and which utterly annihilates the principle of the economical consternation of words, and which is characterised by polysyllabic configurations, utterances, and/or discursives, is most implorable, and rather often leads to other such unintentional rejectamenta as archaisms, and, as I have been saying that it had been said in days of yore, to malporpisms, as well as to the employance of incorrect or awkward word forms, plus to transparently false pseudosynonymous terms. (This fault is often incurred while reading a foreign-language dictionary with which you are infamiliar.) Furthermore, however, sometimes a writer will lapse. He will lapse into horrid ways. So boorishly horrid are these ways that one likes not to see them. The ways are old ones. They are from the past. They are from the laconicly terse past of the writer. And thus the spell is broken. He has been exposed. His overuse of words is shown to be a show. The show was literally deceitful. Again, he has tried to write above his own head. He has indicated and demonstrativated his millidesuetudinal Carrollian and Hemingicidal tendencies, which are many. Beyond any reasonable possibility of doubtfulness (that is, indubitably), verbosity must be ousted, avoided, and most emphatically eradicated whenever possible in order to avoid insincere or noisome writing, ambiguity of significance, and the quick fall to worser sins like incorrect forms, archaisms, malporpisms, and all that sort of indivisible identity. (Heretofore yclept ‘thing’.)

Las’ but not leas’, the ad noseum use of cliqués, as well as their bosom buddies, unshapely figures of speech, and their alter egoes, clichaic or invented words, is something that really sticks in my, if not everyone’s else, craw. To tell the honest truth, cliqué-strewing is playing with fire, and tends to draw a rearing head across the trail of the path of life, so often crossèd by skeleton-like black felines from our closets. As quick as said cat can wink one of its eyes, a list can be produced by me of every John Doe’s John Hancock who’s had it up to here with figurative speech cliqués. These scarlet letters of the field of composition have got to go. They just don’t cut through a hot stick of butter, and their surly utilisers slowly but surely self-destruct and, furthermore, pine away until the cat (same abovesaid) has their well-honed tongues in temporary possession, and they are udderly unable to make contact with the rest of the world, in the big picture. The System is, of course, mostly to blame for this Aristotelocratian logic, or conspicuous lack thereof, which gives the green light for such ignant linguidcidal habitats to preveil. The sad truth of the matter is that the terse and and trite use of overused cliqués only throws wretched monkeys, as pawns, into the Game Of Life, for which it takes two to dawdle over.

In reclusion, therefore, any half- or three-quarters-baked nit-, half-, or dim-wit can see through the hase, like mist on a groggy morn, or antemeridian sector of the total period of Mother Earth’s wholly complete rotation about its imaginary ax, is bound to notedly realise that good, sound righting cannot be writely afflicted with malporpisms, cliqués, verbosity, too many word, redundancie, roonespisms, or barnyard talk. Which, being non sequiturly mispelled. Nor was it suffered of awkward things of chiffs on tense, lace, tone, or your point of view, if you get my drift. Let us endeavour nobly to idealise and worsen, as grave images, the truely noble aids of the holy, inculpably inpalpable popes of the knavish-brew world of wrighting for communicatory pleasure.