When it was Megan's turn to pick a sentence we could ridicule, she took out a recent New Yorker and quoted Louis Menand on Charles Dickens: "In life, there is little evidence that Dickens was, in the context of his time and place, a sexist or a prude."
Johnny said: How about Homer? St. Augustine? Rabelais? Was he a "sexist or a prude"? How about Emerson? Gogol? Gide? Coleridge? Flannery O'Connor? Alexander Pope? Virginia Woolf? Yeats? John Donne?
Katya: "In death, there is little evidence that Dickens was a sexist or a prude." See the difference?
Isabelle: An imperfect example of the historical fallacy: that we today, in our infinite wisdom, feel free to criticize the benighted citizens of the past.
Megan" Why "imperfect"?
Isabelle: Because of the hedging, as Katya pointed out.
Johnny: My professor at Rutgers said write every sentence as if it could be put on your gravestone.
Megan: My vote for most pernicious phrase goes to "It's not your father's Oldsmobile" ahead of "up close and personal."
— Walter Carey
For other pieces by Walter Carey, the pseudonym of a self-styled "contrarian" writer of our acquaintance, click here, or here, or here, or here, or on these links:
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/farewell-to-leicester-squares-by-walter-carey.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/06/pitching-a-no-hitter-on-lsd-by-walter-carey.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/09/the-two-party-system-by-walter-carey.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/a-curse-on-blockheads-by-walter-carey.html
https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/10/the-real-reason-linda-amy-carlson-left-blue-bloods-after-7-seasons-by-walter-carey.html