Feast on This!
June 10, 2011
Yesterday, I criticized someone’s misuse of a word, and frankly I always feel a bit small when I do that. Not only does it imply that I myself never make mistakes, but it suggests that the only pleasure I get out of language is the mean, tight-lipped satisfaction of catching someone in an error. Actually, I love language, particularly when it startles me into seeing something in a way I’ve never seen it before. This happened today when I read Ariel Levy’s piece in the New Yorker about Silvio Berlusconi, the rather creepy Prime Minister of Italy. Here’s the sentence Levy wrote: “Berlusconi is Italy’s waning Hugh Hefner, alternately reviled and admired for his loyalty to his own appetites.” “Loyalty to his own appetites”! What an arch piece of phrasing that is! I’ll never think of superannuated hedonism in quite the same way again.
—Dennis
