I’m reading Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ at the moment, having just read his Nobel Prize winning novel ‘Buddenrooks’.
Mann’s writing is sparkling, and it is my intention to read everything he wrote, so taken am I with his use of words and language.
I encountered a phrase yesterday-verbal chicanery-which caused me to smile. It is such a beautiful phrase and describes what all of us engage in from time to time.
As it happens, I have a WRC hearing coming up shortly and the exhortation from my client was strongly encouraging me to dominate the other party in the other dispute, presumably with, inter alia, verbal chicanery.
WRC hearings don’t work like that, however. But the phrase immediately brought to mind the expectation of my client of some type of verbal or oratorical gymnastics to win the case.
Mann’s books are full of phrases like this, quality, beautiful, descriptive phrases that should not just be read and noticed but used from time to time in everyday life.
I must revive my store of such phrases which I began to assemble when reading Dickens but, alas, eventually abandoned.