When Puns, Metaphors, and Alliteration Meet Blue Pencil

By Marilyn Schwartz
Managing Editor
University of California Press

From the May 16, 2002 forum:
When the Word, Phrase, and Even the Sentence Are Not Quite Right

• The great Gothic cathedrals of Europe are among the towering achievements of Western culture.
  

• The contemporary prominence of a proposed paradigm’s proponents within the discipline offers little protection against such exogenous determinants of acceptability.
  

• Sexual discourse entered the public realm in an explosive fashion, and the entire framework for sexual understanding came loose from religious and proscriptive moorings.
  

• The development of varieties of vegetables for ornamental use in gardens is not a uniquely modern phenomenon but is rooted in the introduction of exotic vegetables to Europe starting as early as the thirteenth century.

• The rainbow of intellectual traditions that colored Israeli and particularly Sabra environmental values may have marveled, embraced, or attacked the land. But nobody hid from it.
  

• No simple recipe lights the path.
  


• Jainism is, along with Buddhism, the only surviving example of India's ancient non-Vedic religious traditions.
  


• Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1850), a novel so sentimental as to be continually awash in tears, is also a novel so stark as to be continually under the shadow of chance, a novel as relentlessly driven by unforeseeable randomness as Moby-Dick (1851), its contemporary and in many ways its antithesis, is relentlessly driven by foreseeable destiny.
  


• It may be considered politically wise to get a court to share the responsibility for arresting those whom the Executive has probable cause to believe are violating the law.
  


• By 2003 gunshot wounds will be responsible for more deaths across the nation than automobile accidents.