M Humbert is in New
York City and working reluctantly in the advertising
industry. His complaints include:
…how repulsed I was by
the glitter of deodorized career girls…
Such economy of description grown to greatness of
expression. (And how like me, I might add with apology.)
He escapes the ad industry and takes a position with an
Arctic survey:
I had little notion
what object the expedition was pursuing. Judging by the number of
meteorologists upon it, we may have been tracking to its lair (somewhere on
Prince of Wales’ Island, I understand) the
wandering and wobbly north magnetic pole. One group, jointly with the Canadians, established a weather station on
Pierre Point in Melville Sound. Another group, equally
misguided, collected plankton. A third studied tuberculosis in the tundra.
Bert, a film photographer – an insecure fellow with whom at one time I was made
to partake in a good deal of menial work (he, too, had some psychic troubles) –
maintained that the big men on our team, the real leaders we never saw, were
mainly engaged in checking the influence of climatic amelioration on the coats
of the arctic fox.
Such restrained cynicism towards the academic process raises
a rare smile. More than that, such words I could chew and chew like a plug of
favourite tobacco.
By contrast, I followed tonight’s episode of Lolita with a rare viewing of a TV
programme on BBC4. It was a documentary on the Hundred Years War between England and France.
Now, it is widely recognised that one of the chief markers
of maladroit writing is the impulse to add weight to a statement by using two
words or phrases that are effectively, or actually, synonymous. Hence we had
the narrator blessing our sensitive ears with:
… they emerged
profoundly changed and very different.
What on earth has happened to the BBC? Such words remind me of that little piece of eggshell which
your tongue strokes and your teeth crunch whilst eating an otherwise properly soft egg
and cress sandwich.
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