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August 22, 2000
Every now and then some individual or an organization (like the Associated Press) gets fed up with written material that is riddled with just plain bad writing and words that very few people understand. Then they begin a lonesome crusade to eliminate the use of such words and phrases because they are meaningless to most of their poor readers. Attorneys and aspiring novelists are quite often their target because they seem to be the worst offenders. Unfortunately, such efforts usually last for only a short time, and before you know it the perpetrators are hard at it again.
I suppose everyone who tinkers with the English language is guilty of this offense once in a while. (Yes, that includes your humble correspondent here, but in self-defense I must say that I never meant to do it.) Anyway, it's' always interesting to read about efforts to wipe out overblown wordiness. One of my favorites in this regard is an annual contest sponsored by San Jose (Calif.) State University. Each year the school asks for the worst possible opening sentences to an imaginary novel. Something like 10,000 people enter worldwide. It's called the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. The prize is a cheap word processor and literary infamy. Just because it tickled my funny bone, I'm going to expose you to some of the entries from one of these yearly contests. The winner in this particular year was Janice Estey of Aspen, Colorado. Here is her winning entry:
"Ace, watch your head!" hissed Wanda urgently, yet somehow provocatively, through red, full, sensuous lips, but he couldn't, you know, since nobody can actually watch more than part of his nose or a little cheek or lips if he really tries, but he appreciated her warning."
"Delightfully silly" was the way Scott Rice, a professor of English who has promoted this contest since 1982, described the winning contribution. He praised the sentence for betraying readers' expectations. Furthermore, he said: “It kind of pulls the rug out from under the reader. It also calls attention to all the expressions in language we use and don't pay any attention to. (Pardon me, Professor Rice, but doesn't your last sentence contain a rather glaring grammatical error itself?)
The name of the contest, Bulwer-Lytton, is derived from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, a prolific 19th century novelist whose book, "Paul Clifford," begins: "It was a dark and stormy night." You probably recognize that trite phrase from the typewritten efforts of the beagle in the "Peanuts" comic strip. The contest has a separate category for puns, and I want to give you one of the recent winners. Michael Cunningham of Woodridge, Ill., produced it. Here's what he came up with:
"It was as hot as a jalapeno outside, the smog hung in the air like bits of pepper on three-day-old cottage cheese, and the Condiment Police, after extricating themselves from one pickle after another, were running late in their effort to ketchup with a bad egg named Sal Sodium, who was armed to the teeth and who was stalking a gorgeous tomato for the twenty-four carrots on her finger, so they slipped into their flack jackets with relish before moving in on a salt with a deadly weapon." Rich prose, don't you think?