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Why the world needs editors (quote from columnist Russell Baker, died Jan. 21)
Thread poster: Susan Welsh
Susan Welsh
Susan Welsh  Identity Verified
United States
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Russian to English
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Jan 24, 2019

Russell Baker, who wrote a famous humor and commentary column for the New York Times for 36 years, left us this quote in one of his columns, Jan. 4, 1973. Fill in your national designation of choice in place of the first word:

"Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon som... See more
Russell Baker, who wrote a famous humor and commentary column for the New York Times for 36 years, left us this quote in one of his columns, Jan. 4, 1973. Fill in your national designation of choice in place of the first word:

"Americans don't like plain talk anymore. Nowadays they like fat talk. Show them a lean plain word that cuts to the bone and watch them lard it with thick greasy syllables front and back until it wheezes and gasps for breath as it comes lumbering down upon some poor threadbare sentence like a sack of iron on a swayback horse."

https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/04/archives/american-fat-observer.html

(The headline to this post is my opinion, not expressed by Baker!)

More from the column:
"Long words, fat talk—they may tell us something about ourselves, Has the passion for fat in the language increased as self‐confidence has waned? We associate plain talk with the age of national confidence.... It is the campaign of 1948 when a President of the United States could open a speech by saying, 'My name's Truman. I'm President of the United States and I'm trying to keep my job'.”





[Edited at 2019-01-25 12:45 GMT] ▲ Collapse


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Why the world needs editors (quote from columnist Russell Baker, died Jan. 21)







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