Sentence of the year

Dan McQ

Dan McQuillen
In the midst of the best article I have read about the pandemic yet, Ed Yong's brilliant How the Pandemic Defeated America, I was struck by the sentence extolled by Roy Peter Clark as the "sentence of the year."

What helped Ed Yong write the sentence of the year?
Make that the semicolon! It’s a maligned mark in the journalism world but it enabled the Atlantic reporter to build a breathtaking 212-word sentence.


I thought this would be just the crowd to dig into both the article (difficult to understate just how comprehensive and, well, great it is) and exactly how breathtaking (or not) a 212-word sentence could be.

Oh, speaking of great, a 2005 Sea Smoke Botella proved the brilliance of the rule of 15 this past Sunday night with marinated grilled flank steak - just the right balance of maturity and a glimpse of its youth. It ain't getting better. A younger wine, the second to last bottle of my 2014 Clos Roche Blanche Pinot d'Aunis took 2 decants then 90 minutes to rid itself of reductive anger but waiting then was a really wonderful mature wine, itself a fine foil for grilled fresh swordfish marinated using a 60 Minute Gourmet standby recipe. Best pandemic eating in a while. Rereading this paragraph I wonder whether I should have added a semicolon or three.
 
Great article. Great sentence. But my favorite was:

“Not least, it should elect leaders with sound judgment, high character, and respect for science, logic, and reason.”

Putting aside the substance, applaud the commas.
 
Periodic sentences can go on virtually forever and still be clear because the periodic clauses are all, essentially, self-contained. Read some Gibbon and you'll come up with much longer ones. Proust is harder to achieve and probably shouldn't be tried by kids at home.
 
originally posted by Lee Short:
Can we add Kant as the exemplar of sentences that can go on forever and are fantastically difficult to follow?

Some philosophers are difficult because they have difficult ideas. Kant did have difficult ideas, but he also needed two semesters of 1st year Comp. His writing is truly atrocious.
 
The semicolon was not the only hero in the article, the benefits of an accomplished editor are so often underrated and unacknowledged:


"Ed Yong
@edyong209
Ross will never take credit for this, but he edited the shit out of this piece. He tautened, pruned, and polished it. Accepting his tracked-changes was a joy--like watching a time-lapse of your own work metamorphosing into something better."

 
originally posted by Dan McQ:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
"tautened" ?

Amazingly it seems to be an actual word...


Something to pull out of nowhere for the next scrabble game.

I’m not amazed at all and am fairly certain I’ve used it before in conversation for “making [something] taut”

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Dan McQ:
originally posted by MLipton:
originally posted by Dan McQ:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
"tautened" ?

Amazingly it seems to be an actual word...


Something to pull out of nowhere for the next scrabble game.

amazed

Mark Lipton

#sarcasm, as my kids would say (fully admitting I have never used it conversationally)

As they say around here, Dan, jokes are always better when explained.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by Dan McQ:
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
"tautened" ?

Amazingly it seems to be an actual word...


Something to pull out of nowhere for the next scrabble game.
OK, if George, Charles, and Noah say so.

I'd still probably reach for "tightened" instead.

Tight isn't completely interchangeable with taut. This one could say "his muscles tautened in apprehension," but one couldn't use the word tighten there. If you really object to the word, which really is hardly an arcane one, you might replace it with became taut in that sentence and with other like constructions elsewhere.
 
Frankly, the word that caught my eye in the piece was in the second sentence:

"A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation."

My brain read it as "mite" and thought it was a typo, but no. In fact, I was not the only one with a restricted vocabulary.

Mote = small particle, speck
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
There is a biblical passage about the mote in your brother's eye and the beam in your own. I guess it's not that well-known on the internet.

Science fiction fans might be familiar with Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye.

Mark Lipton
 
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