Peter Bowler - Selected Passages

Selected Passages

• "Circumambagious, a. – Employing a roundabout or indirect manner of speech. Not as effective, perhaps, on the whole, as an aid to obfuscation, as the sesquipedalianism fostered by this book, always assuming, if you will forgive a somewhat Jamesian digression (Henry, that is to say, in contradistinction to P.D.), that obfuscation is in fact the objective, and having in mind also that, setting aside the relative merits of the two different approaches toward that end, vis-a-vis each other, it can hardly be doubted that the employment of both together, as distinct from one or the other, must have a still greater obfuscatory, or perhaps more precisely, obscurantist, impact, a point well evidenced by the fact that this particular instance of circumambagiousness has, as I believe you will discover, successfully diverted your attention from the fact that nowhere in this admittedly now somewhat overlong sentence is there, despite its superabundance of subsidiary clauses, a principal subject or verb."