Hail Long Sentences! @ Link Wanderlust

| 0 comments

The short sentence has earned a great deal of appreciation- it’s rational; brevity thy name is wit. But long sentences are necessary and provide the kind of pauses, akin to breath control in music, and tensions of a high-wire act that are required to make a narrative interesting.

A phraseologist like Sinatra overlays the meter with something like confiding speech. He is all about the lyrics—you can hear him enunciate every syllable—and it feels as if he is saying as well as singing them to you, stretching out and twisting the pitch of words as we do in speech. Sinatra sings in sentences.

You can break down a long sentence into a poem.

Think of a long sentence as a poem and it will always be clear, because each part of it will unravel in little musical phrases, with all the different parts coloring one another without it ever feeling discordant.

Cheers to all the long sentences that ignite beauty in our lives! Read In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence: Frank Sinatra. Now there’s a guy who could string together a lotta words by Joe Moran.

it's on looney tunes GIF by Looney Tunes World of Mayhem

 

Leave a Reply

%d bloggers like this: