8. Author's self-consciousness.
'You mean it is,' she said—'about Bertie'. Charlie made the noise usually written 'Pshaw'.–E. F. Benson.
9. Intrusive smartness—another form of self-consciousness.
Round her lay piles of press notices, which stripped the American variety of the English language bare of epithets.–E. F. Benson.
Income-tax payers are always treated to the fine words which butter no parsnips, and are always assured that it is really a danger to the State to go on skinning them in time of peace to such an extent as to leave little integument to remove in time of war.–Times.
Yet in the relentless city, where no one may pause for a moment unless he wishes to be left behind in the great universal race for gold which begins as soon as a child can walk, and ceases not until he is long past walking, the climbing of the thermometer into the nineties is an acrobatic feat which concerns the thermometer only, and at the junction of Sixth Avenue and Broadway there was no slackening in the tides of the affairs of men.–E. F. Benson.
54. Miscellaneous Types of Journalese
Mr. Lionel Phillips maintained that it was impossible to introduce white unskilled labour on a large scale as a payable proposition without lowering the position of the white man.–Times.
How labour can be a proposition, and how a proposition can be payable it is not easy to say. The sentence seems to mean: 'to introduce...labour on a large scale and make it pay'. This is what comes of a fondness for abstracts.
They have not hitherto discovered the formula for the intelligent use of our unrivalled resources for the satisfaction of our security.–Times.
This perhaps means: 'They have not yet discovered how our unrivalled resources may be made to ensure our safety'.
An attempt to efface the ill-effects of the Czar's refusal to see the workmen has been made by the grant of an interview by the Czar at Tsarkoe Selo to a body of workmen officially selected to represent the masses.–Spectator.
The powerful and convincing article on the question of War Office administration as it affects the Volunteers to be found in this month's National.—Spectator.
The Russian Government is at last face to face with the greatest crisis of the war, in the shape of the fact that the Siberian railway...–Spectator.
