When Puns, Metaphors, and Alliteration Meet Blue Pencil
By Marilyn Schwartz
Managing Editor
University of California Press
From the May 16, 2002 forum:
When the Word,
Phrase, and Even the Sentence Are Not Quite Right
- The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are
among the towering achievements of Western culture.
- The contemporary prominence of a proposed
paradigm’s proponents within the discipline offers little
protection against such exogenous determinants of acceptability.
- Sexual discourse entered the public realm
in an explosive fashion, and the entire framework for sexual understanding
came loose from religious and proscriptive moorings.
- The development of varieties of vegetables for ornamental use in gardens is not a uniquely modern phenomenon but is rooted in the introduction of exotic vegetables to Europe starting as early as the thirteenth century.
- The rainbow of intellectual traditions that
colored Israeli and particularly Sabra environmental values may
have marveled, embraced, or attacked the land. But nobody hid
from it.
- No simple recipe lights the path.
- Jainism is, along with Buddhism, the only
surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic religious traditions.
- Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850),
a novel so sentimental as to be continually awash in tears, is
also a novel so stark as to be continually under the shadow of
chance, a novel as relentlessly driven by unforeseeable randomness
as Moby-Dick (1851), its contemporary and in many ways its antithesis,
is relentlessly driven by foreseeable destiny.
- It may be considered politically wise to get
a court to share the responsibility for arresting those whom the
Executive has probable cause to believe are violating the law.
- By 2003 gunshot wounds will be responsible for more deaths across the nation than automobile accidents.
Copyright 2004, Marilyn Schwartz, UC Press.
When the Word, Phrase, and Even the Sentence Are Not Quite Right