delanceyplace.com 10/24/05 - short words

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In today's excerpt - the fundamental contribution that Samuel Clemens - Mark Twain - made to the simplifying of American prose:

"He valued brevity, and indeed his work was seminal in purging American literary English of its heavy Victorian ornamentation. 'An average English word is four letters and a half,' he observed, adding that he had shaved down his own vocabulary till the average was three and a half. Any language, to him, was a form of music."