THE BLUNDER BOARD -- Message 7

From the mouths of babes:

During summer quarter my college writing class and I have been following your blog. Ouch! You are dead on right. It’s like reading a manual on what not to do as a writer. Our instructor gave us an assignment to find examples of bad writing in books, so my writing lab partner brought in her aunt’s unread copy of WHH. The aunt is a fanatical member of a freakie cult Cekada and his little buddy run in the suburbs. We had a blast picking random pages and finding all the dumb mistakes.

Our agnostic instructor had a good time with cliches like “be that as it may” [pp. 137, 201, 257, 322], “from strength to strength” [p. 76], “follow the beat of his own distant drummer” [p. 128], “mists of history” [p. 221], “vast quantities of information” [p. 248], “cast restraint to the winds” [p. 307], and “waiting in the wings” [p. 314].

Finally she asked us to use another book because with WHH it was like, well, to use a cliche, “shooting fish in a barrel.” Anyway she said that WHH comes from a vanity press. She explained how anybody with a few extra bucks can get into print nowadays. Our job was to find examples of “failed edited English prose,” and the instructor agrees with you - no real editor would have let that book go to press.

Has the Reader thought about a post devoted to Cekada’s cliches?

The Reader replies: Frankly, we don’t know if we’re up to another slog through that awful mess, and you and your instructor have done a pretty good job yourselves. All of us are fearful that Anthony Cekada’s bad style will contaminate our taste. His writings should come fitted with a bell to warn away all those who seek to retain decent prose style. When one of the Readers went to Vernazza for vacation, he took along Newman’s The Arians of the Fourth Century so that he could purify his brain with literate English. (Once he recovers, he’ll be sending us some notes on Anthony’s ineptitude as a translator of the Breve Esame Critico [“The Ottaviani Intervention”].)

However, we were so impressed with your page citations that we feel obliged to share one of the worst clichés from WHH. Like the stupidly pompous “be that as it may,” Anthony is overly fond of the catch phrase “take to its logical conclusion” (pp. 114, 181, 183, 185, 247, 336) and its variants “logical extension” (p. 195) and “logical consequences” (p. 52). These are scientific-sounding clichés (more vogue words than popularized technicalties), valueless tokens for better, more accurate words, of which our poorly trained author knows nothing. Such abuses are substitutes for thought or they are intended to suggest that thought took place when it really didn’t.

This catch phrase gives the false impression that the writer worked out any number of subtle propositional operations, when all he meant was that as a result of one idea, something radical happened: a skillful writer would simply have referenced the idea and then narrated the result. This annoying phrase (not even a good cliché or catch phrase inasmuch as it had no expressive value to lose in the first place) should almost always be omitted. For instance, on p. 181, he could have written “As a result of the bishops’ conference, the tabernacle needed to be exiled from the main part of the church” instead of “The bishops’ conference thus took the Roman legislation to its logical conclusion: the tabernacle needed to be exiled from the main part of the church.” (Of course, a good writer would have employed a far less clunky phrase than “needed to be exiled from.”)

Father’s variants “logical consequences” and “logical extension” are examples of slipshod extension (“when some accident gives currency among the uneducated to words of learned origin, and the more so if those words are isolated or have few relatives in the vernacular,” explains Fowler). A logical consequence is a term of art meaning that we will never get a false conclusion from an argument with true premises: in other words, because of its logical form, the argument is deductively valid. In logic, extension (or denotation) is the property by which a concept refers to the sum of real things (actual and possible) to which an essence can be applied. In WHH, these terms serve as fancy (and inaccurate) synonyms for “result”: e.g., p. 52, “All these proposals were the logical consequences [read result, fruit, etc.] of Jungmann’s corruption theory…”; p. 195, “But what I experienced…was merely the logical extension [read result, outgrowth, etc.] of the post-Vatican II ‘theology of greeting’….”.

The cloying overuse of clichés, hackneyed phrases, battered ornaments, and catchwords is another sign of the banality of Work of Human Hands and the insignificance of Fr. Cekada’s unfocused musings. If there is one instance when we just possibly might admit the phrase, it may be the following: “Literate members of the blogosphere took Pistrina Liturgica’s message to its logical conclusion and refused to buy Work of Human Hands.” We’ve provided true premises (multiple blunders, bad style, slap-dash reasoning), so the conclusion necessarily follows.