Letters

GRAMMAR LESSONS
Ijust finished reading Debra Goldman’s “Don’t Ask, Please Tell” column [The Consumer Republic, Feb. 9], and I just want to say what a pleasure it is to read the writing of someone who so obviously delights in well-crafted prose. You could practically sing her sentences!
Ms. Goldman wields alliteration, using its power wisely: ” it felt good to hear the soothing sibilants of ‘surplus’ and ‘Social Security,'” she writes, soothing the reader with sibilants. And having soothed, she whacks us upside the head with “collection of cue card-sized cliches.”
She eschews everybody’s favorite verb, “is,” moving her argument forward on the wheels of action verbs, thus: “For all our professed distaste for the seamy details, we’ve been spinning the TV dial, chasing rumors of chimerical dresses stained with presidential semen.”