BOB GORBY / APRIL 15, 2017 AT 6:53 PMREPLY
Mahvelous! I’m surprised there are no examples from Poe. He also had a thing about over-loading his sentences with scads of punctuation marks. Sesquipedalia is a habitual use of words longer than needed to convey the meaning (from Latin sesqui-: 3/2, i.e., 1.5). Is there a comparable word for “sentences that are longer than they need to be to convey the idea”? Or “sentences that have too many punctuation marks”? If not, then there should be!
BOOKFOX (AUTHOR) / APRIL 16, 2017 AT 6:54 AMREPLY
I love that idea for a word for sentences that are longer than they need to be! How about sententiaegus? Combining the latin for sentence and long?
CODY / JUNE 29, 2017 AT 10:03 AMREPLY
Some of these are breathtaking.
Here’s one, long but certainly not the longest, from the Hungarian writer Laszlo Krasznahorkai. He’s known for never breaking paragraphs, and his sentences are often over a page long.
Irimias scrapes the mud off his lead-heavy shoes, clears his throat, cautiously opens the door, and the rain begins again, while to the east, swift as memory, the sky brightens, scarlet and pale blue leans against the undulating horizon, to be followed by the sun, like a beggar daily panting up to his spot on the temple steps, full of heartbreak and misery, ready to establish the world of shadows, to separate the trees one from the other, to raise, out of the freezing, confusing homogeneity of night in which they seem to have been trapped like flies in a web, a clearly defined earth and sky with distinct animals and men, the darkness still in flight at the edge of things, somewhere in the far side of the western horizon, where its countless terrors vanish one by one like a desperate, confused, defeated army.” – from Satantango, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
BOOKFOX (AUTHOR) / JUNE 29, 2017 AT 2:44 PMREPLY
Oh, incredible! Thanks for submitting that one.
DRAKE / SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 AT 8:28 PMREPLY
I’m surprised Pynchon was not in the list somewhere.
ABDUL KADIR / MARCH 11, 2018 AT 1:31 PMREPLY
What a great post !
SALAH HADILL / MAY 10, 2018 AT 1:53 AMREPLY
nerds
R VAN / JUNE 23, 2018 AT 2:23 PMREPLY
Yes, long sentences may give the brain quite a workout, especially when English is not one’s first language (even if it be). However something tells me (and I shall remain adamant in my thinking) that most people would prefer the straightforwardness of Sir Terry Pratchett’s description to the frequent circumlocutory “madness” of Dick
