Verbal Garbage.

Today I came across a site (can’t remember the name, but I do assure you I did indeed come across it – all the way to the other side, even) for all those kinky sesquipedalian (I’m bound to have spelt that wrong – my troubles with normal, straightforward spellings, leave alone words having circumvallated themselves within thick walls of rough and dense verbage that I cannot for the life of me seem to penetrate, are well documented) out there (You rock, you crazy guys!! Or, as you’d perhaps prefer it – You are of an extremely calciferous, petrous and lithic nature, you outrageous, outlandish, mentally challenged sapient species)…

I actually can’t seem to remember how I did come across that site, you know… Mysterious. Inexplicable. Baffling, even. I mean, for one, it didn’t start off with four beers – that’s generally how these Great Mysteries start (It's like one moment you're in a cozy bar, having a little drink, and then, wham! the next moment you're in a dark alley at three in the morning with a concupiscent cat trying to interest you in the smell of it's rear). And secondly, I was supposed to be doing my assignment (on second thoughts, I think thats how I managed to come across it). And that got me thinking about this email I got the other day (Oh, fie upon you, perfidious disingenuous element of confabulation!) about verbose, periphrastic and generally confusing sentences; and so removing myself from the customary hebetudinous and torpid manifestations that usually accompany the somnolent state that I currently find myself in, I have contrived to reproduce, as best I can, examples of the above that are sure to delight and disgust you:


We'd Say : Beggars are not choosers
They'd Say : Sorting on the part of mendicants must be interdicted.

We'd Say : Beauty is only skin deep
They'd Say : Pulchritude possesses solely cutaneous profundity.

We'd Say : Cleanliness is godliness
They'd Say : Freedom from incrustations of grime is contiguous to rectitude.

We'd Say : Look before you leap
They'd Say : Surveillance should precede saltation.

We'd Say : Where there's smoke, there's fire!
They'd Say : Where there are visible vapours having their provenance in ignited carbonaceous materials, there is conflagration.


Isn’t this a fantabulous fricassee of the fustian form?!? Compendious, epigrammatic and orotund it most certainly is not. And in response, I would like to quote the pithy, sententious apothegm of the immortal Auther Dent.

As I recall, his exact words were, “Eh?”

- Me.

P.S. A game for those among you who enjoy such sport... There is one word used wrong in the sentences above. Would any of you care to point as to out which one it actually is?