[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Fri Dec 8 12:15:47 PST 2006


boddi satva wrote:
>
>
> We want to avoid the practice of making
> up a lot of new language without any underlying necessity

You cannot avoid such things IN ADVANCE. I am serious in claiming that attempts to avoid such in advance lead to serious repression of thought. I ordinarily insist that "censorship" applies only to state suppression of speech and writing, but we do have a fairly serious analogue of state censorship here.

You can try (often successfully) to knock down "language without any underlying necessity" AFTER THE FACT.

To try to prevent it before the fact is pretty stupid. And leads to banal tautology. "Without underlying necessity" is banal and stupid unless you are talking about a specific text.

Carrol



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