Comment by Animats
1 month ago
I was just reading the 1897 style guide of the City News Bureau (Chicago), in the book "Hello, Sweetheart, Get Me Rewrite!". Some highlights:
- Do not confuse 'night' with 'evening'.
- This office spells it 'programme'.
- Hotels are 'kept', not 'run'.
- Dead men do not leave 'wives', but they may leave 'widows'.
- 'Very' is a word often used without discrimination. It is not difficult to express the same meaning when it is eliminated.
- The relative pronoun 'that' is used about three times superfluously to the one time that it helps the sense.
- Do not write 'this city' when you mean Chicago.
For what it's worth, LWN maintains the same attitude towards "very" today.
"Very unique" has its own problem.[1] It started appearing online around 2007, according to Google Trends. Sometimes in the description of NFTs. As an absolute adjective, "unique" should not be modified.[1] But now, "very unique" has joined the vocabulary of meaningless marketing phrases.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/very-unique-and-abso...
Americans have no idea what evening is. It's always night for them.
We work past the evening without noticing :)