Friday, August 24, 2012
Gottlieb and Caro argue about length, but they also argue about prose,
even about punctuation. “You know that insane old expression, ‘The
quality of his defect is the defect of his quality,’ or something like
that?” Gottlieb asked me. “That’s really true of Bob. What makes him
such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of
exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as
consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t
know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to
English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a
semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/magazine/robert-caros-big-dig.html?pagewanted=2&_r=2&ref=bookshttp://
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