Tuesday, 1 November 2011

Writing it Right.

Language has interesting little asides to offer. Suppose you wrote:

‘It’s good to know you, you know?’

No self-respecting writer would commit such an ugly utterance to paper. Having the same word repeated without a break doesn’t trip easily off the tongue. And yet it has symmetry to commend it.

The same can’t be said of the phrase an ex-colleague of mine used when he was making appointments over the phone: ‘See you then, then.’ Terrible.

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