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A pedant's corner deserves a devil's advocate's corner facing it: A little outrageous (in a fun way) but perfectly reasonable choice in making the writing more

A pedant's corner deserves a devil's advocate's corner facing it: A little outrageous (in a fun way) but perfectly reasonable choice in making the writing more vivid. It implies that Marcel's theory of innocence is like a religion. That might be an intentional implication whose subtlety escaped you, if the author intended that. Or it could be that the author didn't intend that and just misused the word. I would give the author some benefit of doubt here based on their command of language displayed. "Marcel spent our entire first meeting trying to convert me over to his religion-like faith in his own innocence" Would be a much more appropriate way to render it than the intentionally obtuse way you chose I think I felt strongly enough to comment here simply because I really enjoy seeing fun usages of language like this so I hate to see them smeared as all being accidental screwups, and the only good writing to be really literal writing. (at the same time it is entirely possible this case is unintentional)

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago
To clarify, my point was about the grammaticality of the phrase "prosyletizing his innocence", not about its intendent meaning of Marcel trying to prosyletize the author. I "rendered" as you say the author's sentence by replacing the word "prosyletizing" with its meaning: "Marcel spent our entire first meeting [prosyletizing] his innocence to me." --> "Marcel spent our entire first meeting [trying to convert me to his religion] his innocence to me." Which is a straightforward substitution and so much easier to justify than your version. A valid criticism could be about my use of the word "me" between "convert" and "his religion" which is extraneous. Didn't notice that though, while playing devil's advocate, did we now? Btw the rest of the author's writing is also crap, afaic.

YeGoblynQueenne 3y ago

To clarify, my point was about the grammaticality of the phrase "prosyletizing his innocence", not about its intendent meaning of Marcel trying to prosyletize the author. I "rendered" as you say the author's sentence by replacing the word "prosyletizing" with its meaning: "Marcel spent our entire first meeting [prosyletizing] his innocence to me." --> "Marcel spent our entire first meeting [trying to convert me to his religion] his innocence to me." Which is a straightforward substitution and so much easier to justify than your version. A valid criticism could be about my use of the word "me" between "convert" and "his religion" which is extraneous. Didn't notice that though, while playing devil's advocate, did we now? Btw the rest of the author's writing is also crap, afaic.