Writing is changing with texting and blogging. Will there be an evolution of grammar and punctuation?
We use our cell phones to call each other IN the house!
How 'bout that?!!
READ this last night and wondered if long , descriptive sentences will ever return and the reading of them gives one breadth and depth instead of frustration.
The Docks of London
“”Whither O splendid ship” the poet asked as he lay on the shore and
watched the great sailing ship pass away on the horizon. Perhaps, as he
imagined, it was making for some port in the Pacific; but one day almost
certainly it must have heard an irresistable call and come past the
North Foreland and the Reculvers, and entered the narrow waters of the
Port of London, sailed past the low banks of Gravesend and Northfleet
and Tilbury, up Erith Reach and Barking Reach and Galleon’s Reach, past
the gas works and the sewage works till it found, for all the world like
a car on a parking ground, a space reserved for it in the deep waters
of the docks. There it furled its sails and dropped anchor.”
Oxford Street Tide
“The palaces of Oxford Street ignore what seemed good to the Greeks,
the Elizabethans, to the eighteenth-century nobleman; they are
overwhelmingly conscious that unless they can devise an architecture
that shows off the dressing-case, the Paris frock, the cheap stockings
and the jar of bath salts to perfection, their palaces, their mansions
and motor-cars and the little Villas out at Croydon and Surbiton where
their shop assistants live, not so badly after all, with a gramophone
and wireless, and money to be spent at the movies – all this will be
swept to ruin.”
Great Men’s Houses
“There are hills on the further sid in whose woods birds are singing,
and some stoat or rabbit pauses, in dead silence, with paw lifted to
listen intently to rustlings among the leaves. To look over London from
this hill Keats came and Coleridge and Shakespeare, perhaps. And here at
this very moment the usual young man sits on an iron bench clasping to
his arms the usual young woman.”
Abbeys and Cathedrals
“Something of the splendour of St. Paul’s lies simply in its vast
size, its colourless serenity. Mind and body seem both to widen in this
enclosure, to expand under this huge canopy where the light is neither
daylight nor lamplight, but an ambiguous element something between the
two.”
“This is the House of Commons”
“Dipping and rising, moving and settling, the Commons reminds one of a
flock of birds settling on a stretch of ploughed land. They never
alight for more than a few minutes; some are always flying off, others
are always settling again. And from the flock rises the gabbling, the
cawing, the croaking of a flock of birds, disputing merrily and with
occasional vivacity over some seed, worm or buried grain.”
Portrait of a Londoner
“When Mr Smedley, for instance, said that his daughter was engaged to
Arthur Beecham, Mrs Crowe at once remarked that in that case she would
be a cousin twice removed to Mrs Firebrace, and in a sense niece to Mrs
Burns, by her first marriage with Mr Minchin of Blackwater Grange. But
Mrs Crowe was not in the least a snob. She was merely a collector of
relationships; and her amazing skill in this direction served to give a
family and domestic character to her gatherings, for it is surprising
how many people are 20th cousins, if they did but know it.”