What do they call this?

[alfaguru]

There's a literary tic practised particularly by journalists which I find irritating. It's the one in which a description of someone's personal characteristics are lazily folded into a sentence where they don't really belong. Here's a a couple of examples from THE CHILD SEDUCERS by John Steinbacher, a right-wing rant against sex education in

Comments

[land_girl]

Yes. Along with putting somebody's age, where they went to school, and calling them by their surname only (particularly women).

[doetja]

Yeah, there's a word for that. Pretentious. Sample sentence: "John Steinbacher is a pretentious tosser."

[bis0nfish]

Apart from making it all up? Describing a child as a 'tot', money as 'cash', a request as a 'plea', a statement of intent as a 'roar', an improvement in legislation as 'tightening up' (wonderfully covered on The Day Today by Chris Morris showing people in the street an elastic band and asking if the law should be tightened 'this much'), correct enforcement of a law as a 'crackdown', giving the value of a house (the Daily Mail a particular sinner here), and so on. He roared from his £5,000,000 country mansion.

[mzdt]

completely unconnected question; if I have a book from 1909, author died 1929, illustrator 1920 (so OK for 70yr rule?) but publisher extant, anything at all I need to consider before putting any/all online for local historians?

ta!

[alfaguru]

IANAL, but text should be OK (as text, not as reproduction of page). Illustrations I am not so sure about: you can get into mechanical reproduction rights issues. Usually publishers don't make a big deal about them but it might be wise to ask.

[mzdt]

lovely, thank you, v useful (although I did have to look up the young person's internet-based acronym...)

Will email publishers, I suspect my main challenge will be to find anyone interested...