What Sayers said

[q_pheevr]

Anyone who has paid much attention to the Language Log’s occasional examinations of prescriptivism and style manuals and such will have noticed a few truisms that come up again and again:

1. People who write very well sometimes say silly things when they try to advise others on how to write well.
2. People who give advice on writing do not always follow

Comments

However...

[thnidu]

Bunter is always the epitome of the gentleman's gentleman

Indeed he is... and quite aware of it. He speaks in elegant periods, never using such colloquialisms and even slang as Lord Peter makes so free with. (This is, I believe, part of a pattern: the old nobility don't need to prove their elegance, while the middle class and aspirants feel it necessary. Think of Hyacinth Bucket /buˈkɛ͜ɪ/.)

And he doesn't always get it exactly right. He's speaking this style as he has painstakingly learned it, presumably from teachers and hearing and reading. And the dangling participle is part of how he's learned it. Is Lord Peter, or Harriet Vane, ever guilty of this solecism?

Re: However...

[q_pheevr]

That's a good point; I hadn't considered it from that angle. On the whole, though, I'm still inclined to attribute the lapse to Sayers rather than to Bunter, for a couple of reasons:

1. If the hanging participle were deliberate on Sayers's part, I really think she would have had Lord Peter comment on it. In the context in which it appears, Bunter is presenting a rather long bit of exposition, which Lord Peter periodically interrupts-sometimes to ask for more detailed information, but sometimes simply to comment rather pointedly on the relish with which Bunter is telling his tale. ("Really, Bunter, your narrative style would do credit to the Castle of Otranto," he says, and then a bit later, "Look here, Bunter, could you not cut out some of the fancy adjectives and say plainly what the face was like?") Wouldn't Sayers, if she had intentionally planted such a particularly juicy dangler in Bunter's mouth, have taken the opportunity to break up the exposition a bit more by having Lord Peter himself ask whether it was the prohibition that was

Re: However...

[thnidu]

I would agree that if this was meant to be part of Bunter's usual style (like Lord Peter's "ain'ts") he'd do it more often. I think this one just slipped by Sayers. Not surprising: they're exceptionally easy both to write and to miss (unless they're funny).

Hey, my captcha is a proverb: mindful succeeds

[tungol]

Hi, just a note to say I know you've had me on your friends list for a while, and I'm finally adding you back.

[q_pheevr]

Thanks! I'm afraid I'm not posting much these days myself, but I do keep up with LiveJournal to some extent, and I've always found your posts interesting.

Atethnekos

[anonymous]

About "meteoric rise":

More than just the piece of rock or metal, I think "meteor" can also refer to the mere phenomenon of light that is created by that piece. This is of course the older meaning of the term, as such lights were seen and called "meteors" long before they were known to be caused by falling rocks. And if you look up into the sky, you can see that these lights may occur without any merely phenomenal suggestion that something is falling; it may just look like a light extending from one part of the sky to the other.