{"id":10026,"date":"2005-10-19T08:25:23","date_gmt":"2005-10-19T12:25:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2005\/10\/19\/10026.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:53:09","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:53:09","slug":"how-could-anyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2005\/10\/19\/how-could-anyone\/","title":{"rendered":"How could anyone…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Count Your Humble Blogger among those who are regularly surprised that people still think that Mssrs. Strunk and White have mostly good advice about The Elements of Style<\/a>. Fond as I am of Mr. White actual writing (both his wonderful children’s books and his essays), his writing style benefits immeasurably from his ability to ignore Mr. Strunk’s advice, which he passes on to us. We should follow his example, at least in ignoring the advice, if not in passing the advice along.\n

So, when the illustrator of the new edition is quoted in the New York Times (Style Gets New Elements<\/a>, by Jeremy Eichler) asking “how could anyone not have illustrated this before?”, well, in my own case, aside from not being interested in illustrating generally, having no talent for it, I specifically never illustrated The Elements of Style<\/I> because I dislike the book.\n

To pick another example at random, William Hogarth never illustrated The Elements of Style<\/I> because he died in 1764 and Strunk wasn’t born until 1869.\n

So, Gentle Reader, how could you<\/I> not have illustrated The Elements of Style<\/I> before? Submit your answers to the Tohu Bohu, remembering to Omit Needless Words, eschew the passive, do not contract, avoid beginning your sentences with and<\/I> but<\/I> or however<\/I>, and heck, make up another pointless and arbitrary rule that has never been followed by any decent writer. Here’s one: ending a sentence with any word more than six letters long is an egregious grammatical violation.\n

chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Count Your Humble Blogger among those who are regularly surprised that people still think that Mssrs. Strunk and White have mostly good advice about The Elements of Style. Fond as I am of Mr. White actual writing (both his wonderful…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10026","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10026","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10026"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10026\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17569,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10026\/revisions\/17569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10026"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10026"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10026"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}