Lytton Strachey's diction

 I recently mentioned Lytton Strachey, whose biographical essays I admire.

I like the length. Life is short, and there are minor characters in history I’d like to know a little about without having to read a dissertation. Strachey was good at that.

After leaving a topic, I often have second thoughts. And I’ve been thinking about Strachey’s diction.

What’s unusual about it? Part of it is that he lived in a different time. But he also had an unusual voice. He chose words.

He wrote of “monitory” messages, when most of us might have said that someone sent a warning.

He said that Horace Walpole wrote “alembicated” sentences, which the dictionary defines as “overrefined as if by excessive distillation: excessively subtle: precious.”

I’m interested that Strachey used those words, though I wouldn’t use them myself.

Here’s one, however, that strikes me as useful: “concatenation.”

Here’s Merriam-Webster:

1: a group of things linked together or occurring together in a way that produces a particular result or effect

2: the act of concatenating things or the state of being concatenated : union in a linked series.

I’ve resisted calling this collection of notes a “blog” because that just doesn’t seem quite right to me. Maybe this is just a concatenation. 

• For recent notes on Strachey, see “A model for a biography,” Feb. 4, 2023; “The lives of friends and acquaintances,” Feb. 3, 2023; and “Letter writers and their readers,” Feb. 2, 2023.