The Best Worst Opening Lines

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. The 19th century English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton is said to have coined the phrase, the pen is mightier than the sword, but he’s best remembered for the first line of his 1830 novel called Paul Clifford. And that single long sentence, with the help of a semicolon, a dash in parentheses, reads, it was a dark and stormy night.

The rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets, for it is in London that our scene lies, rattling along the housetops and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I actually like that!

Yeah, it needs some editing, but I think that’s the problem. I think I didn’t pass through enough eyes before I reached the page. But I think I still want to read the rest of that. It’s pretty interesting.

But as it happens, that sentence inspired the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which, as you know, Grant started at San Jose State in 1982. And this is where contestants try to write these extravagantly awful and clever first sentences that reflect that kind of florid language and the rapid points of view and that kind of thing.

Well, the latest winners were just announced, and I wasn’t crazy about a lot of them, but I really like this runner-up. It’s from Mark Meaches in Dallas. He writes, irony, bombasted Inspector Simons, is when someone believes themselves more clever than anyone else in the room, but they are in fact careless and foolish.

And the murderer, Matilda Danner. Yes, Matilda, you killed… Wait, where’s Matilda?

She did. I want to read the rest of that. That’s good, yeah.

We’ll share a little bit more later in the show, but for now, we want to talk with you about any aspect of language whatsoever. So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you know of a particularly bombastic passage of writing that we should know about too, by all means send it along. Or write one.