A cut and paste needing your comments re the war in Ukraine.

The reason why Europe is currently destabilized is the US. To a lesser degree the feckless Europeans have contributed but the endless provocation by our CIA and State Department caused this conflict. We have had many opportunities to acknowledge the existence of Russia, and it harms us not at all to permit them prestige in a cooperative manner, but no, we would not tolerate that. We just kept at it, trying to evolve Russia into the new world order of slaves and their digital masters. This idiocy will obliterate NATO, and destroy our currency. The US will no longer be a world power and sadly, no longer a democracy. This is just, because we have shown to be as evil as any former dictatorship, Nazis included. Wuhan bioweapon? Stolen elections? Murderous wars on innocent people? All the evils attendant with this propaganda, the famines created by climate change, the race-baiting, the persecution of innocents. The murderous mrna experiment? The encouragement of China? We are reaping what we (our perverse elites) have sown.

This page is a permanent link to the reply below and its nested replies. See all post replies »

Lhayezee · 26-30, F

@WalterF I know it is perfectly legitimate as an expression but the word order is sufficiently antique I should expect to find it not in a comment of the twenty-first century but in a periodical of some one hundred and fifty years past. That I might write in a fashion so stilted now demonstrates, I would suggest, the point. One finds it unlikely even in Dickens. I should be interested, mildly, to hear from one fluent in Russian on the point of word order in that language.

The remainder of the paragraph is, of course, a mere list; if it continued in the fashion in which it opened, then I should more readily believe it to be the work of a man possessed merely of charming and quaint ways of expression.

WalterF · 70-79, M

@Lhayezee Your original comment was on this specific expression. (It is obvious that the writer of the extract is not a gifted writer, but that was not your point.)

The intention of the post-er was to draw attention to the content, not the style.

You mention Russian. Why?

By the way, my Cambridge MA was in French and Russian Language and Literature. I have spent all my career teaching English in France to adults and university students. One of my courses is on Scientific Writing.

hippyjoe1955 · 70-79, M

@Lhayezee As someone trained in the use of language to convey ideas I often switch up the word order. It draws attention to what I just said. It is often the case that we gloss over words we may not want to hear or read when they are presented in the usual order. When the words are not in the expected order our ears/eyes pick them out and emphasize them in our mind. By moving the "not" you picked up on it. So much so you made comment about it. The writer's goal was achieved.