Why I love the internet (part 93)

[shewhomust]

gillpolack posted about something she's noticed in her recent reading, about the use of adjectives. It made me think of a story I read long ago, and have been telling people about ever since - but this time I googled it, and there it was: Jack Finney's Cousin Len's Wonderful Adjective Cellar (go on, read it - it's short and sweet).

Comments

[gillpolack.livejournal.com]

I love this - thank you for remembering it and sharing it.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of fun - and just the right length, too!

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Curiously, my memory always shortens the title: I think of it as Cousin Len's Adjective Cellar...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I love that piece by Jack Finney. Thanks.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Happy to spread the word...

[helenraven.livejournal.com]

That was wonderful. Thank you!

It seems that the style of Nature columns has been exasperating people for some time (do they still exist?). One of my favourite pieces of Saki is the following from "The Jesting of Arlington Stringham" (published in 1911):

The page-boy had brought from the library By Mere and Wold instead of By Mere Chance, the book which everyone denied having read. The unwelcome substitute appeared to be a collection of nature notes contributed by the author to the pages of some Northern weekly, and when one had been prepared to plunge with disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives it was intensely irritating to read "the dainty yellow-hammers are now with us, and flaunt their jaundiced livery from every bush and hillock." Besides, the thing was so obviously untrue; either there must be hardly any bushes or hillocks in those parts or the country must be fearfully overstocked with yellow-hammers. The thing scarcely seemed worth telling such a lie about.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I have so many favourite pieces of Saki! Also, "Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole"

And yes, they still exist: there's The Guardian's Country Diary (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/countrydiary), for one...

[helenraven.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten the plashy fen!

Regarding the Country Diary, I was about to comment on your habit of using links to pass on the misery to me, but then the Adjective Cellar does make up for quite a number of flowery poodles.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

The best thing about the Country Diary is actually the Clifford Harper illustrations (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/apr/19/artsfeatures.art), but these never make it through to the online edition - possibly he saves them for his own, very irritating, web site (http://www.agraphia.co.uk/bin/agraphia.html).