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You already used that word. In college, I took a twentieth-century literature course from a professor who constantly used the word “ostensibly.†He used it so much that I started keeping track one day in class. I had notched more than a dozen marks in the margin of my spiral notebook by the time he wound up his lecture on postcolonialism in J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians or whatever book we were discussing that day. While I remember enjoying the class quite a bit, what I really remember was “ostensibly.â€
What, do you not have a thesaurus lying around there somewhere?â€
I find it useful to describe objects with different words when I refer back to them
And when he would release the reins,
the stallion strode across the plains.
As ties whipped freely in the wind,
the horse was breathing in the stream.
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While it's obviously not good to always use the same word or phrase, I've seen pieces of writing that just sound so forced, where the writer is obviously bending over backwards to always use a different synonym, even if it comes up a whole bunch of times in a single short piece. That's every bit as bad, if not worse.
And yes, the infinitive is split on purpose. Euphony trumps grammar, sez oy.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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