For your time out from English grammar this week, I highly recommend two very interesting and provocative readings. The first is Richard Fortey’s review in
The Guardian UK of Richard Dawkins’s latest book,
The Greatest Show on Earth, which makes broadsides against the religious fundamentalists who continue to oppose Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. The second, also in
The Guardian UK, is David Denby’s article on snark, the attacks done under the guise of wit that he says are “invading all modern discourse from gossip sites to newspapers.”
In his review, “Richard Dawkins’s latest broadside just misses its target,” Fortey says that Dawkins, whom he describes as “Darwin’s pit bull,” once again demonstrates his consummate skill as an explainer of evolution in his new book. However, Fortey says he isn’t sure “whether Dawkins is rehearsing his arguments here to stiffen the backbones of those involved in the debate with ‘intelligent designers’, or whether he really thinks that the scales will fall from their religious eyes, cauterised by his searing arguments.”
Read Richard Fortey’s review of Richard Dawkin’s The Greatest Show on Earth now! In his article “It’s not big and it’s not clever,” Denby makes a lowdown on snark as a sly and downright nasty activity that “seizes on any vulnerability or weakness it can find—a slip of the tongue, a sentence not quite up to date, a bit of flab, an exposed boob, a blotch, a blemish, a wrinkle, an open fly, an open mouth, a closed mouth.” He describes snarky writers as people who “can’t bear being outclassed by anyone” and who uses snark as “the vehicle of their resentment and contempt.”
Read David Denby’s “It’s not big and it’s not clever” now!
