Literary Use
John Clare (English peasant poet) wrote with his own spelling and no punctuation: he complained c.1820-1830 to his editors that people could understand him, and that he wouldn't use "that awkward squad of colon, semi-colon, comma, and full stop" (source - display in Clare's cottage, Helpston.)
In Villette (pub. 1853) Charlotte Bronte writes of M. Paul Emanuel: "Irritable he was; one heard that, as he apostrophized with vehemence the awkward squad under his orders."
In Chapter 16 of Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Charles Dickens describes the character Sloppy as " Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life."
Norman Cameron ends one of his poems - Forgive me, sire - with the words 'awkward squad', which plays with the above definition. This would have been written at least about 50 years before the current use.
Read more about this topic: Awkward Squad
Famous quotes containing the word literary:
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“In the course of a life devoted less to living than to reading, I have verified many times that literary intentions and theories are nothing more than stimuli and that the final work usually ignores or even contradicts them.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)