My long-held interest in Henry Harland, chameleon-like editor of the The Yellow Book (feigned Russian-born descent) led me to the British Library website whose profile of Harland begins thus...
‘An itinerant traveller, role-player, and protégé of some of the key literary taste-makers of his time ...’
As an inveterate snatcher-up of unconsidered tautologies, I am reminded of my recent error in directing the attention of an eminent grammarian to the opening chapter of The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler:
‘It was about eleven o'clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills.’
Was not that first sentence tautological, I asked, with WET RAIN hardly exemplary hard-boiled prose.
Was not that first sentence tautological, I asked, with WET RAIN hardly exemplary hard-boiled prose.
Seemingly I had tried the patience of that patient man because promptly came a rap on the knuckles:
‘Some people (especially those on the west coast of the U.S., where Chandler's novel is set) make a distinction between "wet rain" and "dry rain." (See Joel Achenbach's piece on "Dry Rain Again": http://voices.washingtonpost.com/achenblog/2005/09/dry_rain_again.html). More interesting than the apparent tautology, I think, is the paradox of a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills, which introduces a major theme of “The Big Sleep": the gap between appearances and reality.’
May I confess here I sat, bowed, in sackcloth and ashes for at least the length of my elevenses.
Who could have predicted that the Americans would have not only ‘dry rain’, but also ‘hot snow’?
ReplyDeleteYes, but in their defence I don't think they have ever laid claim, tautologically, to 'cold snow'!
ReplyDelete