So writes T.S. in Little Gidding.
What prompts this bit of poetic noticing is an exercise we did in Waste-Of-Time 100 yesterday.
We had to write stuff and get it corrected by the other students.
The one I had to mark contained this:
The word alienation is used by Marx to signify ... blah blah blah
Natch, I put quotation marks around the word "alienation".
Otherwise there would be some weird process or malady called "word alienation".
Maybe that's what my fellow student was suffering from.
Said student didn't get the point of my correction.
I tried to explain the difference between using a word and mentioning it.
But no amount of therapy would stick.
Still it's no wonder that the untrained make this error.
It's all over the press like dogshit.
So, in today's Oz Review we find an article that begins: "The word iconic, once used sparingly, is now everywhere".
Maybe the apparently illiterate author (Jonathan Meades) is actually rather erudite and, like Eliot before him, is qualifying the word "word" with a post-positioned adjective.
But somehow I doubt it.
