“The Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word when it is the right one. they repeat it several times, if they choose. That is wise. But in English, when we have used a word a couple of times in a paragraph, we imagine we are growing tautological, and so we are weak enough to exchange it for some other word which only approximates exactness, to escape what we wrongly fancy is a greater blemish. Repetition may be bad, but surely inexactness is worse.”
Mark Twain, The Awful German Language
The rest of that piece is a satire on the difficulty of the language – really funny – but I like his point here, too. Made me think of certain electronic musics. Rock – Robot Rock.

January 14th, 2010 at 12:39 am
That was a really enjoyable piece. I had never seen that particular Mark Twain writing before. Hilarious.