Features editor Martin Lukacs is going for the record of most awards in this category, with his disregard for what words mean in his quest to sound impressive. About the Cross on the mountain:
The garish fixture is not the first astride Mount Royal.
The phrase “the first astride Mount Royal” doesn’t even sound good, but more importantly, from Merriam-Webster:
And the OED definition is here. Here’s a good example of the word in a sentence: “The McGill Daily Features editor stood astride a pile of dictionaries that he didn’t check before he used the word ‘astride’ to describe a cross that didn’t have anything resembling two legs or lay on both sides of anything.”
So “the first astride Mount Royal” is the Phrase of the day, but the whole piece consists of badly written commentary — or “crabbedly” written (to give the Features editor a conspicuous word he can use) — between quotes by Frederick Law Olmstead.
Does Lukacs have a paper due on Olmsted in one of his classes, making this small Features story with several photos a convenient way to fill two pages? I wonder if he knows that Olmsted co-founded The Nation, in 1865 as an abolitionist magazine, and believed in parks with natural scenery as a way to protect people from the “indoctrination of the commercial [i.e., capitalist] spirit” …
I have never thought to defend Olmsted or attack him — it seems rather pointless to go after him as a symbol of the New World bourgeosie, when one could just directly criticize the ideology — but I have a hunch that some of the quotes Lukacs attributes to him may not be correct. Lukacs puts the phrase “mental disease” in quotes, and it would not surprise me if those were another author’s words, maybe even Lukacs’, put into Olmsted’s mouth. [UPDATE]
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BTW, where was Lukacs when someone at The Daily called Montreal kids trying to get a look at some penguins, “peasant school children [with] running noses”? It’s hard to be consistent when we get into self-righteous, superficial defenses of the proverbial Little Guy … We can profess our anti-elitism, or boast about it, all we want. But even so, we all have different subconscious ways of making ourselves feel special or talented — and this ultimately means special or talented in comparison to the majority of people or a large group of them — for example, by using garish vocabulary. (Note: DailyWatch concedes that the phrase “garish fixture” was a good one, before “astride” came in.)
We might not like to admit it, but a writer at a pretentious moment, having tried to show that his or her tastes are above using (supposedly) pedestrian language, has something in common with the middle-class wanna-be aristocrat who tries to distance his behavior from an idea of “the plebians” he has constructed for himself. [Pointing this out is the purpose of the DailyWatch's Snifter Award.] Frederick Law Olmsted obviously got snooty when he wasn’t fighting slavery … Can Lukacs forgive him for this now that we hold Tam Tams at the Park?
