There were two issues that grabbed my attention in a single paragraph in this story about glamping1 at a Japanese resort that appeared in the November issue of Food & Wine. I decided the best way to resolve the first issue was to remove the parenthetical sentence altogether. And I ultimately realized the other issue wasn't problematic after all. Here's the paragraph in question:
- Glamping, on the other hand, is the illusion of work and ruggedness. (Think of it as like transferring prepared foods into your best serving dishes and adding a sprinkling of cut chives on top before guests arrive.) Essentially you're playacting, with an emphasis on props. Sure, I'm wearing a headlamp, but it lights the wooden staircase back to my climate-controlled room, where a deeply compliant Japanese toilet with a heated seat awaits. I might chop wood or paddle a canoe or hike among the trees, but only under the gently watchful supervision of a "glamping master" who has just delivered a 20-minute safety lecture on the topic.
The first thing that took me aback was the as like in the second sentence. We're used to seeing either one of them being used to make a comparison, not both of them in a row. I considered whether adding being between them would be helpful or overkill. I leaned toward helpful, though the presence of three other -ing words in the sentence gave me pause. I finally concluded that if I'd been the editor or copy editor of this story, I would have made the case for taking out the entire sentence. This particular example makes sense as far as the illusion of work goes, but it has nothing to do with the illusion of ruggedness—unless, maybe, you harvested the chives with an axe. I think it's better to go right from the illusion bit to the part about playacting.
At first, second, and even third reads, I didn't like the use of the topic to refer back to the three things the writer might have been doing in the last sentence. But after further reflection, I decided that since she's considering doing only one of the three at a given time, the singular topic works just fine.
Once I started seriously analyzing the minutiae of this paragraph, I discovered one more, rather small, thing I'd have changed: I'd have made it "Essentially it's playacting," so as to avoid the shift from second person ("you're playacting") to first person ("I'm wearing").
By the way, the expression "deeply compliant Japanese toilet" is brilliant. 😄
Speaking of two things you don't expect to see together, I was flummoxed by multiple instances of the consecutive use of a comma and a dash in the last novel I read, The Professor's House by Willa Cather. The combination came up pretty regularly, sometimes singly and sometimes in pairs within a sentence:
To the new generations of country and village boys now pouring into the university in such large numbers, Langtry had become, in a curious way, an instructor in manners,—what is called an "influence." (page 1302)
Just as, when Queen Mathilde was doing the long tapestry now shown at Bayeux,—working her conronicle of the deeds of knights and heroes,—alongside the big pattern of dramatic action she and her women carried the little playful pattern of birds and beasts that are a story in themselves; so, to him, the most important chapters of his history were interwoven with personal memories. (page 158)
I haven't found a compelling explanation online for why these punctuation marks would have been used consecutively. Tony suggested "the comma is grammatical, and the dash is rhetorical," meaning the latter indicates a greater pause. He also said to look at Wordsworth poetry for other examples of this phenomenon, and I found a bunch of them. This poem contains comma-dashes as well as period-dashes and colon-dashes. If any of you readers can offer further insight into these punctuation combos, I'd welcome it. For now, I'll conclude that I see no need for anything but a dash in my first example. The second sentence is so complex, it almost makes my head ache, but I would have gone with (only) commas after Bayeux and heroes as well as after action. I think the semicolon after themselves is justified by all the commas that preceded it and to remind us of the Just as that began this big ol' mess of a sentence.
I'm generally mellow about diction, and so I don't have a long list of words I despise. If a word is used correctly, who am I to say it offends me? Two exceptions to this mellowness are shod and clad, when used to mean wearing shoes/shoed and wearing clothes/clothed respectively. Nobody ever uses the first word (or shoed) conversationally. Nobody! And if somebody is saying the second word, she's probably referring to metal, not clothes.
This bugaboo of mine came to mind because shod was used in the fourth paragraph of this Bloomberg story I read the other day about an estate sale at Grey Gardens, the former home of "Big Edie" and "Little Edie" Beale, the mother-daughter pair who were the subject of a Maysles brothers documentary of the same name and, later, a terrific Broadway musical and an outstanding HBO movie.
1In case you don't want to bother reading the entire article, but obviously don't have a problem scrolling down the screen for footnotes 😆, I'll tell you the writer is dismissive of the term glamping—a combination of glamour and camping—even while having enjoyed her glamping experience.
2The page numbers refer to Willa Cather: Later Novels, which was published by Literary Classics of the United States in 1990 and which I checked out of my local library a few weeks ago. The Professor's House is the second novel in the six-book collection and Tony's favorite later work of fiction by Cather. I had never read anything by Cather. I really enjoyed TPH and wished for a longer third segment back in the world of the St. Peter family after the (also enjoyable) digression into "Tom Outland's Story" for the middle part of the novel.