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.
