But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour.

So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon.

Offices are peculiar places and nobody is ever quite sure what happens in them, least of all the people who work there. But the day tends to begin with a morning meeting, in which everybody decides what they will fail to do for the rest of the day.

But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn’t make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.

It’s sad to see Time’s toothless mouth laughing the poets to scorn. The stars are all explained and the mist is all measured, and there is no magic left in this dreary world.

Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy, and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.

To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.

They gathered for a confabulation and, having established that secure psychiatric care was beyond their means, they turned in despair to the publishing industry, which has a long history of picking up where social work leaves off.

For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favorite of God and Dickens.

We all know that scientific words need an obscure classical origin to make them sound impressvie to those who wouldn’t know an idiopathic craniofacial erythema if it hit them in the face.