Doing the Charleston

by Theodore Dalrymple (May 2015)

‘In stately old Charleston,’ ran a headline in a recent edition of the New York Times, ‘New Buildings on the Block Are Struggling to Fit In.’ This is a very strange way of putting it: for it reverses the relation between Man and his own productions.

Buildings cannot struggle, not even metaphorically: they are not like fish in the talons of an eagle or a wart hog attacked by a lion. Admittedly one does not look to the Times for elegance of writing, perhaps not even for mere accuracy, though its layout looks as if it was designed by a professor of Aramaic philology at the University of Gottingen in about 1880. Pedantic layout, loose (though dull) writing: that more or less summarizes the Times.  more>>>