File under: Say it ain't so

[Jonathan Lighter]

I believe what she's trying to say in that passage is not that JA can't
write, just that she's discovered a *brand-new and even more fascinating
Jane Austen*.  (There was a time in hjistory you weren't supposed to have to
*guess* at what literary scholars were "trying" to say.)

Surely she doesn't think that, exactly.  But by trying to jazz up the
academic style with the far more marketable pop-media style "(_Life is
Beautiful_ puts a whole new face on the Holocaust! Buy tickets now!"), she
makes a serious rhetorical misstep.

Recognizable by approximately five people on the planet Earth.

JL

On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: File under: Say it ain't so
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Sat, Oct 23, 2010 at 2:12 PM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This usage may be notable too:
> >
> >
> > "The manuscript evidence offers a different face for Jane Austen, one
> > smoothed out in the famous printed novels."
> >
> >
> > If "aspect" is meant (and it may be) the preposition "for" seems quite
> odd.
> > If something like "publicity image" is meant, I'm not sure that it's in
> the
> > OED, though surely it's frequent enough.
> >
> > Cf. (evidently) 1972 in GB: Â "Here, the Pulitzer Prize winner offers a
> new
> > face for the American dream." Â And this, from 2004: "Donahue, the memo
> said,
> > offered 'a difficult face for MSNBC in a time of war. He seems to delight
> in
> > presenting guests who are antiwar, anti-Bush and skeptical of the
> > administration's motives.'"
> >
> > Relevant GB exx. of "offered a * face for" are all quite recent.
> >
>
> Jon, since I have no scholarly reputation or academic reputation for
> lack of bias to protect, I can say it.
>
> "The manuscript evidence _offers a different face for Jane Austen_"
>
> is, at worst, evidence of a lack of command of the academic style of
> writing, and, at best, a stunningly-inept attempt to make a simple
> opinion - "That bitch ain't know how to write shit!" - into a complex
> observation worthy of serious  contemplation by other students of
> Austen's work.
>
> "The evidence contained in her unpublished manuscripts enables us to
> see Austen's finished work from a completely different point of view,
> making clear the fact that the bitch ain't know shit about about no
> writing. In support of this assertion, I present the following
> analysis of her work, based upon her own girlish attempts at
> transforming random thought into a coherent sentence." Etc.
> --
> -Wilson
> –––
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> –Mark Twain
>
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>



-- 
"If the truth is half as bad as I think it is, you can't handle the truth."

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