And a grammar grouch in Switzerland
The Economist this week publishes a letter (albeit tongue in cheek) from a real dyed-in-the-wool prescriptivist grouch, writing from Switzerland. (Switzerland! "They had five hundred years of democracy and peace," snarls Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, "and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!") The letter-writer (note the nominative-case pronoun in his absurdly pompous last sentence) is grumbling about sentence-initial coordinators in the magazine's pseudonymous column on American politics by "Lexington" two weeks before:
SIR — And I thought that The Economist followed its own "Style Guide". But Lexington set a new record for the number of sentences starting with conjunctions (November 7th). But only 12. And I suppose some people appreciate such puerile prose. But not I.
MARC RIESE
Berne, Switzerland
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