* The Guardian supplies a splendid example of the species of parenthetical, half-submerged ‘sea-serpent’ sentence that Mark Twain attempted to warn against: ‘In a highly political family, daughter Rachel also worked for Brown at No. 10 while her older brother Stephen—born in 1970, a few months before his father, only child of a mining family from the closely knit Welsh valleys, became an MP—carved out a post-Cambridge career with the British Council’. This sentence may be boggling in many ways, but it is undoubtedly most boggling for its momentary suggestion of a son born some months before his own father. ~
* Gowers’s preferred system of punctuation has largely fallen out of fashion, though it is still used here and there, for instance in the Times Literary Supplement. ~
* George Eliot uses the ‘I say’ device in Middlemarch: ‘Brother Jonah, for example (there are such unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and bloated at greater expense)—Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in the world …’. But in modern writing this use of ‘I say’ would be likely to invite what Gowers calls elsewhere ‘the prick of ridicule’. ~