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06915_Field_TCUM T480.txt
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1996-04-10
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917b
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consecutive words in the mass medium of the English language.
What would Mr. Minow do, what would any advertiser do,
without the well-worn and corny clichés of popular speech?
Suppose that we were to try for a few sentences to raise the
level of our daily English conversation by a series of sober and
serious sentiments? Would this be a way of getting at the
problems of improving the medium? If all English were
enunciated at a Mandarin level of uniform elegance and
sententiousness, would the language and its users be better
served? There comes to mind the remark of Artemus Ward that
“Shakespeare wrote good plays but he wouldn’t have
succeeded as the Washington correspondent of a New York
daily newspaper. He lacked the reckisit fancy and imagination.”
The book-oriented man has the illusion that the press
would be better without ads and without the pressure from the