Or... when you've mixed Seven Incompatible Images before breakfast... you are a Chinese academic!
Check this out (from the latest 'international studies' articles I've been editing this morning):
"A host of hot and thorny issues will unfold and feed on one another."
OK, so it's only five incompatible images. But even so, FIVE in one short sentence!!!
I think I'm going to e-mail the folks at the Guinness Book of Records.
5 comments:
I don't know--maybe it's a work of subtle genius. The sentence conjures up two very vivid images for me: One is a flame-red, sharp-spined, autosarcophagic Hydra, emerging one head at a time from a crack in the earth, snapping at itself. (The second is a 70's porno flick.)
Please tell me one of these was the subject of the article...my day will be improved vastly!
The mind reels, Cedra. I didn't know Ray Harryhausen made porn in the 70s - a gap in my cinematic education.
The theme of the article was supposed to be 'international security issues in the year ahead'. The excerpted sentence is quite well illustrative of the whole piece: it was the most turgid waffle, with no definite content at all.
Most of the 'academics' I encounter here are producing work that would struggle to get much more than a C in high school.
Did you think it said "hot and horny"??!!
I suppose as an image for international security issues, the Hydra works as well as any (right head not knowing the left)?
(As for Harryhausen's back-room fare, don't feel badly for not being familiar--they had a very limited demographic. Some people like tentacles more than others, you know.)
(And no, it's not that I thought it actually said "hot and horny" so much that with the power of suggestion, the image rose unbidden--adherence to text means little in such moments!)
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