Windfoggery

Wry is this dog larfin'?

Dawg Sez

WINDFOGGERY

When solar machinations disambiguate the confusion of the tenebrous night, then one's most sanguine expectation might be that today is Thursday (here on the left coast of NA anyways). Dog daze once again.

Did I leave ya at the gate, cats and kittens? Windfoggery will do that; but an ounce of perseverance is worth a pound of ... well, nevermind. At this stage of CwHD, a gander at pleonasms seems in order.

Any fool knows that fog rarely exists when the fair winds blow. Verbiage, verbosity, inevitably does just that. Often, with language, we find that the harder blows the wind, the denser gets the fog. This is windfoggery.

Gobbledygook is a common form employed by bureaucrats and politicians. Scientists are also prone to circumlocutions that raise blood pressure. Academics, too, wander in windfoggery droning on until their students' eyes glaze.

The sun chased the night away, as was expected, and today is Thursday. Better?

The active voice is one simple solution to the problem. The cat ate the mouse. More difficult to Latinize the active voice than otherwise. The passive voice requires more words and weakens the impact of the sentence, clarity-wise. The mouse was eaten by the cat. The active is a boxer, jabbing, on the attack. The passive is that very same boxer back peddling, on the defensive, strategy-wise.

One more thing, dear readers: drop the unnecessary prefixes and suffixes---'ize' and 'wise' are the worse offenders. Reading-wise, they be like fleas to hounds.

Arf arf: Ever heard a dog barking for hours on end? Windfoggery.