About

This web-log is devoted to bad prose. Read the word “devoted,” here, however you like. We hope its meaning will become clear, in due course. In keeping with the spirit of globalization, the administrators of “Bad Prose” live in Kyoto and in Omaha. We do not consider ourselves prescriptive grammarians. A dislocated pronoun; bad diction; the incursion of a snappy “ad-copy” style into mainstream journalism; faux colloquialisms deployed as if to establish a rapport with the folk (“OK,” “Let’s get real,” “Just deal [with it],” etc.);—these things affect us as a slightly off-key soprano might affect someone with perfect pitch. We wince. Not that our pitch is “perfect,” of course. It isn’t. But for all that, it is our “pitch,” our “temper,” our “tuning,” nonetheless.

As to “temper” and temperament, Emerson—among the best writers of prose—puts it well enough in “Experience“:

Temperament also enters fully into the system of illusions, and shuts us in a prison of glass which we cannot see. There is an optical illusion about every person we meet. In truth, they are all creatures of given temperament, which will appear in a given character, whose boundaries they will never pass: but we look at them, they seem alive, and we presume there is impulse in them. In the moment it seems impulse; in the year, in the lifetime, it turns out to be a certain uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music-box must play. Men resist the conclusion in the morning, but adopt it as the evening wears on, that temper prevails over everything of time, place, and condition, and is inconsumable in the flames of religion. Some modifications the moral sentiment avails to impose, but the individual texture holds its dominion, if not to bias the moral judgments, yet to fix the measure of activity and of enjoyment.

We accept the limitation, the “uniform tune which the revolving barrel of the music box must play.” But we feel keenly any violations of that tune, that temper. This web-log is a repository of these violations, with the reasons why we hear them as violations. And, of course, we consider it an entertainment, and hope that you do, too, as in sense IV of the O.E.D.‘s definition of the verb “entertain”: “To hold engaged, provide occupation for. To engage, keep occupied the attention, thoughts, or time of (a person).”

Incidentally, feel free to have at us.