Is syntax important?

[Rybuk]

I saw this thread and the first thing I thought of was E.E. Cummings

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

...Maybe I shouldn't have made a Charles Bukowski Quotes site, after all!

[Eric]

Whatever crap this journalist writes otherwise, I was only focusing on the one thing and that is that "matters outstanding" is correct because it clearly signals that the matters have not yet been resolved. In certain circumstances, you can reverse normal word order for syntactical effect. While "said he" has long been archaïc after pieces of dialogue, you can still write "said John" and get away with it, as opposed to "John said".

whatever e e cummings says, you have to observe quite a few rules of syntax if your writings are not to be regarded as badly written. there seems to be a tendency nowadays to think that grammar and syntax are luxuries, as opposed to a way of expressing things more clearly. notice how essemessy it looks when you ignore the convention of starting sentences with capital letters. they don't do so in arabic, hebrew, etc., but we are writing english. some conventions are there to be helpful.

As for "slept in", that's a good point. But the Oxford dictionary does give it as meaning "had a lie in" i.e. staying in bed longer in the morning.

[Eric]

The Independent about the French actor Gérard Depardieu:

He's also seen through a poverty-ravished childhood, a short spell in jail for theft and a 26-year marriage.

I didn't know that poverty could ravish, nor did I know you could be put in prison for having a 26-year marriage... The correct English word is "ravage". "Ravish" means "rape".

[hdw]

The Independent about the French actor Gérard Depardieu:

I didn't know that poverty could ravish, nor did I know you could be put in prison for having a 26-year marriage... The correct English word is "ravage". "Ravish" means "rape".

I remember the kerfuffle some years ago when it leaked out that Depardieu had admitted raping a girl when he was younger. Bad translation. It transpired that he had said he had assisté à a rape - i.e. been present - when he was too young to understand what the older boys were doing.

Harry

[Eric]

Yes, that deserves a place on the faux amis thread. Some half-educated dumbo had been given the task of translation, as usual.

[Eric]

From the Telegraph this morning. Me speak English:

Germany and France looked fail to calm feverish financial markets despite
unveiling raft of economic agreements at summit in Paris.

[Loki]

Here's something that I've been noticing recently in contemporary writers (in writers of thrillers specifically, but I think we can extend it to all types of writers). I've come across sentences in which the relative clause is separated by a full stop from the main clause, while generally we find a comma or nothing ar all: for instance we can write I saw George, who was smoking a cigarette. Now the latest fashion would seem to be writing sentences like I saw George. Who was smoking a cigarette (of course the sentence would be a bit longer than this one). I've never found this thing in older writers, neither in English nor in Italian (it would be the same: Ho visto Giorgio. Che fumava una sigaretta), and now that I'm reading John Grisham's The Broker I've seen two examples of this phenomenon. Now, I don't know if that's something older than I think it is. Anyway, I can't really see why one should want to separate the relative clause from the main one: considering that a relative clause is a subordinate clause, it's absurd to separate the two clauses, as the relative one would stop being a subordinate at all (a convoluted reasoning, I know, I hope I've expressed myself).
While using this kind of sentences does not compromise the understanding, I see the whole thing as useless and illogic from a syntactic point of view.

[Eric]

I would say that the contruction "I saw George. Who was smoking a cigarette." is perfectly acceptable in small doses, for rhythmic effect. But if authors start to dream of writing hard-boiled syntax, they will end up writing half-baked bullshit.

All the perfectly sensible reasoning in the world won't stop an obsessive editor. Who wants to "spice up" or otherwise make more exciting what is yet another boring crime novel. Written to make lots of money.

Maybe Hemingway did it. Ask someone who's read a lot of him.

[Loki]

I don't think people (like me) reading boring crime novels, as you call them, will care much for style, or at least whether the writer separates the relative clause or not.
I remember that I'd already found this thing in Graham Swift's Waterland; I'll write an example, to show that in this case it's different and much better stylistically speaking:

And by the Leem lived a lock-keeper. Who was my father. Who was a phlegmatic yet sentimental man. Who told me, [...]. Who was wounded at the third battle of Ypres. [...] Who when asked about his memories of the war, would invariably reply that he remembered nothing. Yet who when he was not asked would sometimes recount bizarre anectodes...

And so on and so forth for another page, with every paragraph starting with "Who".

[Eric]

The who-who-who author must have been trying for stylistic effect. I don't think he "forgot" about all those whos. But if you do that sort of thing too much you will simply irritate the reader.

When, in "The Death of Vergil", Hermann Broch wrote a sentence that was six-and-half pages long, he knew what he was doing. But now all manner of postmodernist authors try to write whole books in one paragraph, or even one sentence. All these things can be tried once, just like the novel "Finnegans Wake" was an experiment in multi-meaning and portmanteau words. But once again, the trendies have come along and done the same thing so often that it has become a tiring and somewhat narcissistic cliché. If they've got a good story to tell, they don't need to distract the reader's attention with supersyntax and weird words on every page.

Ultimately, syntax should help the reader understand the story, not be foregrounded so that it becomes the story. Because that gets boring very quickly.

[Eric]

A subtle one this, i.e. the use of the verb. I read this headline today:

England are arrogant towards us, says Sweden

Whether this is true or whingeining is not my point. What interests me is the fact that you can tell quite a lot from a mere headline, i.e. a compressed sentence. When you see "England" used with a plural verb, it nearly always means the football team. And yet the verb is in the singular for Sweden. What a curious mixture of singulars and plurals to say that one team doesn't like the other and is getting personal about it.