A linguistic analysis of Dan Brown
Oh, this is a hilarious analysis of the writing of Dan Brown, he of The Da Vinci Code:
I guess by now a watching anthropologist or psychologist would claim to have overwhelming behavioral evidence that Dan Brown is my favorite novelist for summer reading. And indeed, my latest Dan Brown adventure, Deception Point, really rips along (spying, robots, sex, scandal, exobiology, secrets, science, politics, rocket planes, sharks, volcanos, news conferences interrupted by dramatic helicopter arrivals, brilliant deductions telegraphed two chapters earlier — if this plot doesn’t grip you, check with your doctor, you may be dead). But as a Language Log staffer, I had a duty to take a few notes, so I spent my time not only reeling and rocking with the surprises of the plot but also observing the grossly incompetent use of language.
Dan Brown’s writing is so clumsy and inept that I am definitely (God help me) beginning to enjoy the experience of poring over it.
That’s just the warm-up. Geoffrey K. Pullum continues:
The thing is, it’s all the same unmistakable features. Utterly mysterious attempts to describe people’s eyes, for example (my article on Angels and Demons in the book Secrets of Angels and Demons had a whole bunch of these). A soldier on an Arctic glacier has “eyes as desolate as the topography on which he was stationed” (would that mean totally white?) [...]
He ends with
But the acme of inexpertly crunched metaphors in Deception Point is on page 27 (and I swear I’m not making this up) [...]
Oh, no, I’m not going to spoil the surpise. Off you go.
