Sunday, 15 December 2024

Nested Prose

 [...] and the prose is clotted with sentences like this one: “The elaboration of the demonstrative makes possible the comprehension of the singularity of the singular”. Linguists have a term for this kind of writing, where each abstraction is nested in another like so many Russian dolls: bad.
Stephen Brown, ‘Why so many notes?’, The Times Literary Supplement, 5672 (16 Dec 2011), p. 24.