Terrifying rhetorician

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/amis-hitchens-world?cat=books&type=article


Amis on Hitchens: 'He's one of the most terrifying rhetoricians the world has 
seen'
Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his 
exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens
	* Martin Amis 
	* The Observer, Sunday 24 April 2011  
	*  larger | smaller 
 
Christopher Hitchens, left, on holiday with Martin Amis in Cape Cod, 1985.


Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir  Nabokov in 
1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword  to Strong Opinions 
(1973): "I have never delivered to my  audience one scrap of information not 
prepared in typescript beforehand …  My hemmings and hawings over the telephone 
cause long-distance callers  to switch from their native English to pathetic 
French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good  story, I have to go 
back to every other sentence for oral erasures and  inserts … nobody should ask 
me to submit to an interview … It has been  tried at least twice in the old 
days, and once a recording machine was  present, and when the tape was rerun and 
I had finished laughing, I knew  that never in my life would I repeat that sort 
of performance."
We  sympathise. And most literary types, probably, would hope for inclusion  
somewhere or other on Nabokov's sliding scale: "I think like a genius, I  write 
like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child."
Mr Hitchens isn't like that. Christopher and His Kind runs the title of one of 
Isherwood's famous memoirs. And yet this  Christopher doesn't have a kind. 
Everyone is unique – but Christopher is  preternatural. And it may even be that 
he exactly inverts the  Nabokovian paradigm. He thinks like a child (that is to 
say, his  judgments are far more instinctive and moral-visceral than they seem,  
and are animated by a child's eager apprehension of what feels just and  true); 
he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a  genius.
As a result, Christopher is one of the most terrifying  rhetoricians that the 
world has yet seen. Lenin used to boast that his  objective, in debate, was not 
rebuttal and then refutation: it was the  "destruction" of his interlocutor. 
This isn't Christopher's policy – but  it is his practice. Towards the very end 
of the last century, all the  greatest chessplayers, including Garry Kasparov, 
began to succumb to a  computer (named Deep Blue); I had the opportunity to ask 
two  grandmasters to describe the Deep Blue experience, and they both said:  
"It's like a wall coming at you." In argument, Christopher is that wall.  The 
prototype of Deep Blue was known as Deep Thought. And there's a  case for 
calling Christopher Deep Speech. With his vast array of  geohistorical 
references and precedents, he is almost Google-like; but  Google (with, say, its 
10 million "results" in 0.7 seconds) is something  of an idiot savant, and 
Christopher's search engine is much more finely  tuned. In debate, no matter 
what the motion, I would back him against  Cicero, against Demosthenes.
Whereas mere Earthlings get by with a  mess of expletives, subordinate clauses, 
and finely turned tautologies,  Christopher talks not only in complete sentences 
but also in complete  paragraphs. Similarly, he is an utter stranger to what 
Diderot called l'esprit de l'escalier: the spirit of the staircase. This phrase 
is sometimes translated as "staircase wit" – far too limitingly, in my view, 
because l'esprit de l'escalier describes an entire stratum of one's intellectual 
and emotional being.  The door to the debating hall, or to the contentious 
drinks party, or  indeed to the little flat containing the focus of amatory 
desire, has  just been firmly closed; and now the belated eureka shapes itself 
on  your lips. These lost chances, these unexercised potencies of  persuasion, 
can haunt you for a lifetime – particularly, of course, when  the staircase was 
the one that might have led to the bedroom.
As a  young man, Christopher was conspicuously unpredatory in the sexual  sphere 
(while also being conspicuously pan-affectionate: "I'll just make  a brief pass 
at everyone," he would typically and truthfully promise a  mixed gathering of 14 
or 15 people, "and then I'll be on my way"). I  can't say how it went, earlier 
on, with the boys; with the girls,  though, Christopher was the one who needed 
to be persuaded. And I do  know that in this area, if in absolutely no other, he 
was sometimes  inveigled into submission.
The habit of saying the right thing at  the right time tends to get relegated to 
the category of the pert  riposte. But the put-down, the swift comeback, when 
quoted, gives a  false sense of finality. So-and-so, as quick as a flash, said 
so-and-so –  and that seems to be the end of it. Christopher's most memorable  
rejoinders, I have found, linger, and reverberate, and eventually  combine, as 
chess moves combine. One evening, close to 40 years ago, I  said: "I know you 
despise all sports – but how about a game of chess?"  Looking mildly puzzled and 
amused, he joined me over the 64 squares. Two  things soon emerged. First, he 
showed no combative will, he offered no  resistance (because this was play, you 
see, and earnest is all that  really matters). Second, he showed an endearing 
disregard for common  sense. This prompts a paradoxical thought.
There are many  excellent commentators, in the US and the UK, who deploy far 
more  rudimentary gumption than Christopher ever bothers with (we have a  
deservedly knighted columnist in London whom I always think of, with  
admiration, as Sir Common Sense). But it is hard to love common sense.  And the 
salient fact about Christopher is that he is loved. What we love  is fertile 
instability; what we love is the agitation of the  unexpected. And Christopher 
always comes, as they say, from left field.  He is not a plain speaker. He is 
not, I repeat, a plain man.
Over the years Christopher has spontaneously delivered many dozens of 
unforgettable lines. Here are four of them:
1. He was on TV for the second or third time in his life (if we exclude 
University Challenge),  which takes us back to the mid-1970s and to 
Christopher's mid-twenties.  He and I were already close friends (and colleagues 
at the New Statesman);  but I remember thinking that nobody so matinee-telegenic 
had the right  to be so exceptionally quick-tongued on the screen. At a certain 
point  in the exchange, Christopher came out with one of his political  
poeticisms, an ornate but intelligible definition of (I think) national  
sovereignty. His host – a fair old bruiser in his own right – paused,  frowned, 
and said with scepticism and with helpless sincerity, "I can't  understand a 
word you're saying."
"I'm not in the least surprised," said Christopher, and moved on.
The  talk ran its course. But if this had been a frontier western, and not a  
chat show, the wounded man would have spent the rest of the segment  leerily 
snapping the arrow in half and pushing its pointed end through  his chest and 
out the other side.
2. Every novelist of his  acquaintance is riveted by Christopher, not just qua 
friend but also qua  novelist. I considered the retort I am about to quote (all 
four words  of it) so epiphanically devastating that I put it in a novel – 
indeed, I  put Christopher in a novel. Mutatis mutandis (and it is the novel 
itself that dictates the changes), Christopher "is" Nicholas Shackleton in The 
Pregnant Widow – though it really does matter, in this case, what the meaning of 
"is"  is… The year was 1981. We were in a tiny Italian restaurant in west  
London, where we would soon be joined by our future first wives. Two  elegant 
young men in waisted suits were unignorably and interminably  fussing with the 
staff about rearranging the tables, to accommodate the  large party they 
expected. It was an intensely class-conscious era  (because the class system was 
dying); Christopher and I were candidly  lower-middle bohemian, and the two 
young men were raffishly minor-gentry  (they had the air of those who await, 
with epic stoicism, the deaths of  elderly relatives). At length, one of them 
approached our table, and  sank smoothly to his haunches, seeming to pout out 
through the fine  strands of his fringe. The crouch, the fringe, the pout: these 
had  clearly enjoyed many successes in the matter of bending others to his  
will. After a flirtatious pause he said, "You're going to hate us for  this."
And Christopher said, "We hate you already."
3.  In the summer of 1986, in Cape Cod, and during subsequent summers, I  used 
to play a set of tennis every other day with the historian Robert  Jay Lifton. I 
was reading, and then re-reading, his latest and most  celebrated book, The Nazi 
Doctors; so, on Monday, during  changeovers, we would talk about the chapter 
"Sterilisation and the Nazi  Biomedical Vision"; on Wednesday, "'Wild 
Euthanasia': The Doctors Take  Over"; on Friday, "The Auschwitz Institution"; on 
Sunday, "Killing with  Syringes: Phenol Injections"; and so on. One afternoon, 
Christopher,  whose family was staying with mine on Horseleech Pond, was due to 
show  up at the court, after a heavy lunch in nearby Wellfleet, to be  
introduced to Bob (and to be driven back to the pond-front house). He  arrived, 
much gratified by having come so far on foot: three or four  miles – one of the 
greatest physical feats of his adult life. It was set  point. Bob served, 
approached the net, and wrongfootingly dispatched my  attempted pass. Now Bob 
was, and is, 23 years my senior; and the score  was 6-0. I could, I suppose, 
plead preoccupation: that summer I was  wondering (with eerie detachment) 
whether I had it in me to write a  novel that dealt with the Holocaust. 
Christopher knew about this, and he  knew about my qualms.
Elatedly towelling himself down, Bob said, "You know, there are so few areas of 
transcendence left to us. Sports. Sex. Art … "
"Don't forget the miseries of others," said Christopher. "Don't forget the 
languid contemplation of the miseries of others."
I  did write that novel. And I still wonder whether Christopher's black,  
three-ply irony somehow emboldened me to attempt it. What remains true,  to this 
day, to this hour, is that of all subjects (including sex and  art), the one we 
most obsessively return to is the Shoa, and its victims – those whom the wind of 
death has scattered.
4.  In conclusion we move on to 1999, and by now Christopher and I have  
acquired new wives, and gained three additional children (making eight  in all). 
It was mid-afternoon, in Long Island, and he and I hoped to  indulge a 
dependable pleasure: we were in search of the most violent  available film. In 
the end we approached a multiplex in Southampton  (having been pitiably reduced 
to Wesley Snipes). I said, "No one's  recognised the Hitch for at least 10 
minutes."
Ten? Twenty  minutes. Twenty-five. And the longer it goes on, the more pissed 
off I  get. I keep thinking: What's the matter with them? What can they feel,  
what can they care, what can they know, if they fail to recognise the  Hitch?
An elderly American was sitting opposite the doors to the  cinema, dressed in 
candy colours and awkwardly perched on a hydrant.  With his trembling hands 
raised in an Italianate gesture, he said  weakly, "Do you love us? Or do you 
hate us?"
This old party was  not referring to humanity, or to the West. He meant America 
and  Americans. Christopher said, "I beg your pardon?"
"Do you love us, or do you hate us?"
As  Christopher pushed on through to the foyer, he said, not warmly, not  
coldly, but with perfect evenness, "It depends on how you behave."
Does it depend on how others behave? Or does it depend, at least in part, on the 
loves and hates of the Hitch?
Christopher  is bored by the epithet contrarian, which has been trailing him 
around  for a quarter of a century. What he is, in any case, is an  
autocontrarian: he seeks, not only the most difficult position, but the  most 
difficult position for Christopher Hitchens.  Hardly anyone agrees with him on 
Iraq (yet hardly anyone is keen to  debate him on it). We think also of his 
support for Ralph Nader, his  collusion with the impeachment process of the 
loathed Bill Clinton (who,  in Christopher's new book, The Quotable Hitchens, 
occupies  more space than any other subject), and his support for Bush-Cheney in  
2004. Christopher often suffers for his isolations; this is widely  sensed, and 
strongly contributes to his magnetism. He is in his own  person the drama, as we 
watch the lithe contortions of a self-shackling  Houdini. Could this be the crux 
of his charisma – that Christopher,  ultimately, is locked in argument with the 
Hitch? Still, "contrarian" is  looking shopworn. And if there must be an 
epithet, or what the press  likes to call a (single-word) "narrative", then I 
can suggest a  refinement: Christopher is one of nature's rebels. By which I 
mean that  he has no automatic respect for anybody or anything.
The rebel is  in fact a very rare type. In my whole life I have known only two 
others,  both of them novelists (my father, up until the age of about 45; and my  
friend Will Self).  This is the way to spot a rebel: they give no deference or 
even  civility to their supposed superiors (that goes without saying); they  
also give no deference or even civility to their demonstrable inferiors.  Thus 
Christopher, if need be, will be merciless to the prince, the  president, and 
the pontiff; and, if need be, he will be merciless to the  cabdriver ("Oh, 
you're not going our way. Well turn your light off, all  right? Because it's 
fucking sickening the way you guys ply for trade"),  to the publican ("You don't 
give change for the phone? OK, I'm going to  report you to the Camden Consumer 
Council"), and to the waiter  ("Service is included, I see. But you're saying 
it's optional. Which? …  What? Listen. If you're so smart, why are you dealing 
them off the arm  in a dump like this?"). Christopher's everyday manners are 
beautiful  (and wholly democratic); of course they are – because he knows that 
in  manners begins morality. But each case is dealt with exclusively on its  
merits. This is the rebel's way.
It is for the most part an  invigorating and even a beguiling disposition, and 
makes Mr Average, or  even Mr Above Average (whom we had better start calling 
Joe Laptop),  seem underevolved. Most of us shakily preside over a chaos of 
vestigial  prejudices and pieties, of semi-subliminal inhibitions, taboos and 
herd  instincts, some of them ancient, some of them spryly contemporary (like  
moral relativism and the ardent xenophilia which, in Europe at least,  always 
excludes Israelis). To speak and write without fear or favour (to  hear no 
internal drumbeat): such voices are invaluable. On the other  hand, as the rebel 
is well aware, compulsive insubordination risks the  punishment of 
self-inflicted wounds.
Let us take an example from  Christopher's essays on literature . In the last 
decade Christopher has  written three raucously hostile reviews – of Saul 
Bellow's Ravelstein (2000), John Updike's Terrorist (2006), and Philip Roth's 
Exit Ghost (2007). When I read them, I found myself muttering the piece of  
schoolmarm advice I have given Christopher in person, more than once:  Don't 
cheek your elders. The point being that, in these cases, respect  is mandatory, 
because it has been earned, over many books and many  years. Does anyone think 
that Saul Bellow, then aged 85, needed  Christopher's repeated reminders that 
the Bellovian powers were on the  wane (and in fact, read with respect, 
Ravelstein is an  exquisite swansong, full of integrity, beauty and dignity)? If 
you are a  writer, then all the writers who have given you joy – as Christopher  
was given joy by Augie March and Humboldt's Gift, for example, and by Updike's 
The Coup, and by Roth's Portnoy's Complaint – are among your honorary parents; 
and Christopher's attacks were  coldly unfilial. Here, disrespect becomes the 
vice that so insistently  exercised Shakespeare: that of ingratitude. And all 
novelists know, with  King Lear (who was thinking of his daughters), how sharper 
than a  serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless reader.
Art is freedom;  and in art, as in life, there is no freedom without law. The  
foundational literary principle is decorum, which means something like  the 
opposite of its dictionary definition: "behaviour in keeping with  good taste 
and propriety" (i.e., submission to an ovine consensus). In  literature, decorum 
means the concurrence of style and content –  together with a third element, 
which I can only vaguely express as  earning the right weight. It doesn't matter 
what the style is, and it  doesn't matter what the content is; but the two must 
concur. If the  essay is something of a literary art, which it clearly is, then 
the same  law obtains.
Here are some indecorous quotes from the The Quotable Hitchens.  "Ronald Reagan 
is doing to the country what he can no longer do to his  wife." On the 
Chaucerian summoner-pardoner Jerry Falwell: "If you gave  Falwell an enema, he'd 
be buried in a matchbox." On the political  entrepreneur George Galloway: 
"Unkind nature, which could have made a  perfectly good butt out of his face, 
has spoiled the whole effect by  taking an asshole and studding it with 
ill-brushed fangs." The critic DW  Harding wrote a famous essay called 
"Regulated Hatred". It was a study  of Jane Austen. We grant that hatred is a 
stimulant; but it should not  become an intoxicant.
The difficulty is seen at its starkest in  Christopher's baffling weakness for 
puns. This doesn't much matter when  the context is less than consequential (it 
merely grinds the reader to a  temporary halt). But a pun can have no business 
in a serious  proposition. Consider the following, from 2007: "In the very 
recent  past, we have seen the Church of Rome befouled by its complicity with  
the unpardonable sin of child rape, or, as it might be phrased in Latin  form, 
'no child's behind left'." Thus the ending of the sentence visits a  riotous 
indecorum on its beginning. The great grammarian and  usage-watcher Henry Fowler 
attacked the "assumption that puns are per se  contemptible … Puns are good, 
bad, or indifferent … " Actually, Fowler  was wrong. "Puns are the lowest form 
of verbal facility," Christopher  elsewhere concedes. But puns are the result of 
an anti-facility: they  offer disrespect to language, and all they manage to do 
is make words  look stupid.
Now compare the above to the below – to the truly  quotable Christopher. In his 
speech, it is the terse witticism that we  remember; in his prose, what we 
thrill to is his magisterial  expansiveness (the ideal anthology would run for 
several thousand pages,  and would include whole chapters of his recent memoir, 
Hitch-22).  The extracts that follow aren't jokes or jibes. They are more like  
crystallisations – insights that lead the reader to a recurring  question: If 
this is so obviously true, and it is, why did we have to  wait for Christopher 
to point it out to us?
"There is, especially in the American media, a deep belief that insincerity is 
better than no sincerity at all."
"One  reason to be a decided antiracist is the plain fact that 'race' is a  
construct with no scientific validity. DNA can tell you who you are, but  not 
what you are."
"A melancholy lesson of advancing years is the realisation that you can't make 
old friends."
On  gay marriage: "This is an argument about the socialisation of  
homosexuality, not the homosexualisation of society. It demonstrates the  spread 
of conservatism, not radicalism, among gays."
On Philip  Larkin: "The stubborn persistence of chauvinism in our life and 
letters  is or ought to be the proper subject for critical study, not the  
occasion for displays of shock."
"[I]n America, your internationalism can and should be your patriotism."
"It is only those who hope to transform human beings who end up by burning them, 
like the waste product of a failed experiment."
"This  has always been the central absurdity of 'moral', as opposed to  
'political' censorship: If the stuff does indeed have a tendency to  deprave and 
corrupt, why then the most depraved and corrupt person must  be the censor who 
keeps a vigilant eye on it."
And one could go  on. Christopher's dictum – "What can be asserted without 
evidence can be  dismissed without evidence" – has already entered the language. 
And so,  I predict, will this: "A Holocaust denier is a Holocaust affirmer."  
What justice, what finality. Like all Christopher's best things, it has  the 
simultaneous force of a proof and a law.
"Is nothing sacred?"  he asks. "Of course not." And no westerner, as Ronald 
Dworkin pointed  out, "has the right not to be offended". We accept 
Christopher's  errancies, his recklessnesses, because they are inseparable from 
his  courage; and true valour, axiomatically, fails to recognise discretion.  As 
the world knows, Christopher has recently made the passage from the  land of the 
well to the land of the ill.  One can say that he has done so without a visible 
flinch; and he has  written about the process with unparalleled honesty and 
eloquence, and  with the highest decorum. His many friends, and his innumerable  
admirers, have come to dread the tone of the "living obituary". But if  the 
story has to end too early, then its coda will contain a triumph.
Christopher's  personal devil is God, or rather organised religion, or rather 
the  human "desire to worship and obey". He comprehensively understands that  
the desire to worship, and all the rest of it, is a direct reaction to  the 
unmanageability of the idea of death. "Religion," wrote Larkin:  "That vast 
moth-eaten musical brocade/ Created to pretend we never die  …"
And there are other, unaffiliated intimations that the secular  mind has now 
outgrown. "Life is a great surprise," observed Nabokov (b.  1899). "I don't see 
why death should not be an even greater one." Or  Bellow (b. 1915), in the words 
of Artur Sammler: "Is God only the gossip  of the living? Then we watch these 
living speed like birds over the  surface of a water, and one will dive or 
plunge but not come up again  and never be seen any more … But then we have no 
proof that there is no  depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our 
knowledge of death  is shallow. There is no knowledge."
Such thoughts still haunt us; but they no longer have the power to dilute the 
black ink of oblivion.
My  dear Hitch: there has been much wild talk, among the believers, about  your 
impending embrace of the sacred and the supernatural. This is of  course insane. 
But I still hope to convert you, by sheer force of  zealotry, to my own 
persuasion: agnosticism. In your seminal book, God Is Not Great,  you put very 
little distance between the agnostic and the atheist; and  what divides you and 
me (to quote Nabokov yet again) is a rut that any  frog could straddle. "The 
measure of an education," you write elsewhere,  "is that you acquire some idea 
of the extent of your ignorance." And  that's all that "agnosticism" really 
means: it is an acknowledgment of  ignorance. Such a fractional shift (and I 
know you won't make it) would  seem to me consonant with your character – with 
your acceptance of  inconsistencies and contradictions, with your intellectual 
romanticism,  and with your love of life, which I have come to regard as 
superior to  my own.
The atheistic position merits an adjective that no one  would dream of applying 
to you: it is lenten. And agnosticism, I  respectfully suggest, is a slightly 
more logical and decorous response  to our situation – to the indecipherable 
grandeur of what is now being  (hesitantly) called the multiverse. The science 
of cosmology is an  awesome construct, while remaining embarrassingly incomplete 
and  approximate; and over the last 30 years it has garnered little but a  
series of humiliations. So when I hear a man declare himself to be an  atheist, 
I sometimes think of the enterprising termite who, while  continuing to go about 
his tasks, declares himself to be an  individualist. It cannot be altogether 
frivolous or wishful to talk of a  "higher intelligence" – because the cosmos is 
itself a higher  intelligence, in the simple sense that we do not and cannot 
understand  it.
Anyway, we do know what is going to happen to you, and to  everyone else who 
will ever live on this planet. Your corporeal  existence, O Hitch, derives from 
the elements released by supernovae, by  exploding stars. Stellar fire was your 
womb, and stellar fire will be  your grave: a just course for one who has always 
blazed so very  brightly. The parent star, that steady-state H-bomb we call the 
sun,  will eventually turn from yellow dwarf to red giant, and will swell out  
to consume what is left of us, about six billion years from now.
	* guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2011





________________________________
From: Mike Findlay <[email protected]>
To: DADL (off topic) <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, April 25, 2011 4:15:10 PM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] nit-pick


I think we should distinguish between this list and writing as a profession or 
vocation, which I think most of us do.  I've never thought about the make do one 
and I'm not sure where I'd have come down on it if I didn't look it up.  The 
English language does have some strange idiomatic stuff and you could make some 
argument about making due making sense in that you were making something for the 
time being IOW you were making it due right then and there so I could see myself 
making do with make due if I were whipping off a post.  

  
And the souped up vs suped up?  Are we so sure one is correct?  I know I have 
seen sup'ed up but I wouldn't think souped up was necessarily wrong for the 
reason Peter suggested.  Also you're dealing with cars, (in using that phrase),  
and who's to say it wasn't derived from coupe, (being a sportier version of a 
sedan), which would explain the ou. 

 
Exit question:  It is a bit much to require exacting standards for slang/short 
hand phrases?  



Mike F.  




________________________________
From: Karl Swenson <[email protected]>
To: DADL (off topic) <[email protected]>
Sent: Mon, April 25, 2011 3:57:48 PM
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] nit-pick


Good one.  I never considered it.
 
I have been really working on my lazy spelling habits, partly because you, my 
friends.
 
I eschew irregardless completely.  I am very careful with my “it’s and its”, 
“then and than” and “their, there and they’re’.  Affect and effect, insure and 
ensure and many others.
 
And I totally avoid texting and email short hand as much as I can, the ur, r, 4 
instead of for etc.
 
 
 
 
From:[email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of 
Johne Cook
Sent: Monday, April 25, 2011 9:15 AM
To: DADL (off topic)
Subject: Re: [DADL-OT] nit-pick
 
Interesting commentary here:
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=make%20due

I think it's another example of a homophone (and a case of some degree of 
illiteracy). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophone

My pet peeve here is 'souped up,' as in I supercharged the engine of a sports 
car, which would seem to be 'suped up,' but as people are hearing the word 
instead of seeing it, they spell the word they hear and not the correct word. I 
understand how it happens, and also understand I'm one of the only people who 
seems to make a big stink about this, so I'll let it go. As long as I can 
understand what somebody means, I'm fine. (I /guess./)

Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |



On Mon, Apr 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM, Peter T. Chattaway <[email protected]> 
wrote:
If American spelling errors are predicated on the notion that one should always 
use as few letters as possible ("color" instead of "colour", "see-thru" instead 
of "see-through", etc., etc.), then why do I keep seeing the non-existent phrase 
"make due" in some people's writing?

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