I think, linguistically speaking, he is quite late in the day?
As for the cliches, maybe he coined 'em?
Put it another way: maybe they only became cliches because of him?
Exactly! They weren’t clichés when he wrote them! Others repeated his images so insistently that they’re now zombie metaphors. He’s clearly “pre-modern” in my definition. I should’ve written “pre-contemporary”. The cliché explosion is a recent event, although it developed over a long period. That’s my point, it’s not “ancient languages” vs. “modern ones”. It’s classical, all-time use vs. modern tendency to overuse clichés. See Orwell’s article for the details.
Strange! You ask a subjective question and then attack people who answer you.
I didn’t attack anyone.
How are they superior? We just kept the best of Roman, Greek etc literature to study, because only the best texts deserved to cross more than two millenia thanks to the efforts of carvers, monks, scribes, whoever wrote down or reproduced them.
In 2 millenia, when people will learn the ancient languages of English, French, Russian etc, they’ll think it’s superior to their own languages because only the best of the best of our literature will reach them so far.
I partly agree, but I think that virtually all literature from our present date will survive 2000 years so they’ll be able to see both the absolute worst and the best if they so wish.
Maybe all of it will be instantly downloadable to our godly artificial robot brains by that point
I am very sorry adieaz2. My comment should have been directed at Coburg_Shekelstein. You see he is answering people as if he had raised the subject.
“Coburg_Shekelstein” has been trolling this forum for well over a year with abusive (and at times racist) comments.
The civilised approach to such people is to ignore them, IMO.
You have a very loose definition of the word ‘attack’.
“Coburg_Shekelstein” has been disagreeing with the gatekeepers of this forum for well over a year with sensible comments.
The approach we take when we can’t answer to such people is to ignore them. And sometimes report them to the moderators because their logic scares me.
If you behave in an odious way, then it’s inevitable that some people are going to complain - although only your ugliest posts have actually been deleted, as far as I know.
(And that’s a good thing, BTW. Aside from actual criminal incitement, freedom of speech should extend to absolutely everyone - including crackpots and cranks.)
