Yesterday, we read something so loathsome, so terrifying, so repugnant to the human spirit that we almost couldn’t come up with enough adjectives to describe our horror.
And just what was this nightmarish thing?
Oh, only the year’s worst-written sentence.
It won a contest in which people submit terrible opening lines for fake novels. And now that the shock of reading it has worn off, we’ve decided to try writing vomitous sentences of our own. See if you can guess which one is the real contest winner:
1. “She broke into a smile, then a song and dance, leaving out the usual niceties of form, substance and rhythm, only to descend endlessly, fitfully into maudlin prose, the likes of which would inspire only funeral directors and, to their credit, literate canines.”
2. “Gerald began — but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them ‘permanently’ meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash — to pee.”
3. “There had never been a more meteorologically perfect day than the one on which Maud woke and for a moment did not remember that although the daffodils were yellow and the grass was waving and the temperature was a moderate 70 degrees with just a hint of humidity, she would never see her beloved Piggly again.”
Answer: 2. The horror, the horror!
If you like torturing yourself with this wanton abuse of the English language, then head over to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Web site, www.bulwer-lytton.com.
Better yet, try writing your own sentence full of twisted syntax and e-mail it to us at thebuzz@heraldnet.com. We’ll print the best … uh, the worst … uh, whatever, in a future edition of The Buzz.
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