Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Polysyllabic misanthropy

I was reading an old Stephen Fry book over the weekend and came across this passage, in which one of the characters has just started a newspaper column:

Ashley found that he had a gift for tediously obvious opinions expressed in a formulaic polemical style that exactly suited the kind of brain-fagged commuter most ready to confuse polysyllabic misanthropy for intelligent thought. … He had in particular that peculiar journalistic gift of stating all the prevailing bourgeois prejudices in a language that represented itself as ‘maverick’, ‘daring’ and ‘unconventional’.

I’m giving serious consideration to using a chunk of that as my blog strapline.

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