Tuesday 1 January 2013

fraternization

In reverence to one extraordinarily florid line of copy, dateline: Charlotte, 1965, which reports on the domestic murder of a millworker by his family as if the incident were a game of chess, guided by some “occult hand,” there is a loose but exclusive association of journalists that are known to one another by the clever and subtle infiltration of this phrase into print and perpetuating the reporter’s words.
This style of writing, sometimes without affection, is called Purple Prose, typified by stock-phrases like Baron Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous “it was a dark and stormy night…” Incidentally, it is an interesting comparison—purple prose—with the other colours of literary criticism, blue language and yellow journalism. It was an insiders’ joke and I am sure appreciated by anyone hep to it, and then buried away when discovered, aware that most would just overlook the obscure and fancy language. It has grown harder and harder to restrict membership, however, to those in-the-know in recent years and it does not take much sophistication to jar this phrase out of the archives of the press with a simple search on the Internet. In response to the club’s select-status slipping away, the Order of the Occult Hand, is reinventing itself with a new secret and supposedly baroque code phrase. Of course, the rebooted membership is not publishing what this new clichรฉ might be, since that would ruin the fun and expose them again. It will be a fun challenge to try to shoehorn the new passkey out of the headlines and from the newspaper page.