ellauri077.html on line 810: The jargon peculiar to Marxist writing (hyena, hangman, cannibal, petty bourgeois, these gentry, lackey, flunkey, mad dog, White Guard, etc.) consists largely of words translated from Russian, German, or French; but the normal way of coining a new word is to use Latin or Greek root with the appropriate affix and, where necessary, the size formation. It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentary and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one´s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.
ellauri096.html on line 96: There is no place in science for bigness, because of this lack of boundary; but there is a place for the relation of biggerness. Here we see the familiar and widely applicable rectification of vagueness: disclaim the vague positive and cleave to the precise comparative. But it is inapplicable to the verb ‘know’, even grammatically. Verbs have no comparative and superlative inflections … . I think that for scientific or philosophical purposes the best we can do is give up the notion of knowledge as a bad job and make do rather with its separate ingredients. We can still speak of a belief as true, and of one belief as firmer or more certain, to the believer’s mind, than another (1987, 109).
ellauri164.html on line 372: I blew through this novel myself, which in retrospect was somewhat of a grave mistake, as the book alternates between compelling and highly engaging dialogues to unrealistically long monologues which to me resemble a Rimbaud poem in translation than anything else, which is to say: hard to parse. That they got more than what they bargained for is what the ordinary reader will be struck by first when they read this. The complexity of each of the conversations cannot be overstated, which I think will inevitably result in readers just mechanically scanning the sentences rather than internalizing the arguments, with the final result being the great part of the novel sliding off like rain, leaving only vague impressions like it did with me unfortunately, but the parts that did affect me left me very humbled. And chiefly this impression will not be helped by another one of the defining features of the novel, which is its vagueness. It deliberately leaves a lot of key details unheard and leaves a lot to the ability to infer events by the reader. Though sometimes frustrating to a reader like me who reads history and biography, I recognize that it should be so for this novel, for the main conflict in it is a psychological one, so I wouldn't have it any other way.
3