Friday, January 22, 2010

A Latin lover's protest

William Zinsser (of "On Writing Well" fame) beats up on "Latinate" English in The American Scholar, blaming its "pompous" and "florid" vocabulary for all the modern sins of business bafflegab. Trevor Butterworth, responding in Forbes, calls BS on Zinsser, defending both Latin and Cicero against the clichéd calumny:
What constitutes "good" writing in the 20th and 21st centuries is more the result of ideology than a discovery of the innate purity of Anglo-Saxon thought and expression (so pure the Anglo-Saxons didn't sully themselves by writing much that is memorable beyond Beowulf).
I've written about Butterworth before -- he's also the author of a charming defense of the semicolon, "Pause Celebre," published in the Financial Times in 2005.

Hat tip: Chris Shea of Brainiac, my Globe Ideas colleague.

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