28 January 2009

thirty-nine theses (27)

Strong Opinion #27:

This is one of the worst constructed sentences I've ever read (from A Secular Age by Charels Taylor).

"Thus among some peoples, agents fall into trance-like conditions which are understood as possession; among others (sometimes the same ones), powerful portentous dreams occur to certain people, among others, shamans feel themselves to have been transported to a higher world, with others again, surprising cures are effected in certain conditions; and so on."

The rest of the paragragh doesn't improve things.

1 comment:

Greg said...

Yeah, I remember that sentence, more so because it did not make sense as a sentence rather than because it was a challenging concept