3 ms·

"Easy reading is damn hard writing." -Nathaniel Hawthorne

• gruseom 16y ago
  Clever and true, but no 19th century American writer would ever have written in that way. Even Mark Twain, surely the closest in spirit to such a style, was an order of magnitude more grandiloquent than that in his published writing. And don't forget that "damn" was a swear word then (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=damn&year_sta...). No, this is very much a 20th century aphorism. A quick look at Wikiquote reveals that the earliest validated citation is... Maya Angelou! In an interview from 1989. But they trace it back to Sheridan (1819): You write with ease, to show your breeding, But easy writing's curst hard reading. Now here's how Americans really wrote in the 19th century (chosen at random from Hawthorne, http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Hawthorne): There is a fatality, a feeling so irresistible and inevitable that it has the force of doom, which almost invariably compels human beings to linger around and haunt, ghostlike, the spot where some great and marked event has given the color to their lifetime; and still the more irresistibly, the darker the tinge that saddens it. Rather different! I can't resist another: The aspect of the venerable mansion has always affected me like a human countenance, bearing the traces not merely of outward storm and sunshine, but expressive also, of the long lapse of mortal life, and accompanying vicissitudes that have passed within.
  • j_baker 16y ago
    Thanks. It did seem rather odd. Regardless, the sentiment is true. :-)