The world's worst sentence?

By P.J.C.

FINANCIAL books are not renowned for their literary merits. Neverthless, the reader is still entitled to expect something better than the following (from Philip Mirowski's new book "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste"):

Yet the nightmare cast its shroud in the guise of a contagion of a deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

That is not just a mixed metaphor; it is meaningless and pretentious at the same time. One would nominate it as the world's worst-written sentence but it is only the opening clause. After a semi-colon, the author drones on for a further 32 words, from which Economist readers should be spared.

What happened to the editing process at Verso, which allowed this book to be published? All authors benefit from a trimming of their stylistic excesses. The odd flourish is fine and an attempt at humour in a work of financial analysis is usually welcome. But this does not consist of adding one clause after another, or piling adjective upon adjective. Just a few pages later, Mr Mirowski produces another monstrosity:

The nostrum of "regulation" drags with it a raft of unexamined impediments concerning the nature of markets and governmentality, and a muddle over intentionality, voluntarism, and spontaneity that promulgates the neoliberal creed at the subconscious level.

Such leaden prose weakens any hope that the author might have of persuading the reader to slog though his 467-page attack on neoliberalism. George Orwell's rules of writing (which introduce The Economist's in-house style guide), are always worth repeating:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

4. Never use the passive when you can use the active

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent; and finally

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say something outright barbarous

Many a financial tome would be easier to read (not to mention shorter) if writers and editors would only bear these rules in mind. Another candidate for the title of "world's worst sentence" was the closing effort in Pablo Triana's "Lecturing Birds on Flying" (which we reviewed in 2009). John Wiley was the guilty publisher:

Deliciously paradoxically, the Nobel could end up diminishing, not fortifying, the qualifications-blindness and self-enslavement to equations-led dictums that, fifth-columnist style, pave the path for our sacrifice at the altar of misplaced concreteness.

On the other hand, some sentences can be so awful that they are impossible to shake from the memory. Your blogger still recalls the following from a financial book two decades ago:

Investors rushed into the market like lemmings and got their fingers burned

It is awful, but it is mercifully short.