You're right, Henry. Particularly strange since, in his essay "Politics and the English Language", Orwell specifically holds up for scorn the use of multiple negatives, quoting a sentence by Harold Laski:
Quote:
"I am not, indeed, sure whether it is not true to say that the
Milton who once seemed not unlike a seventeenth-century
Shelley had not become, out of an experience ever more bitter
in each year, more alien [sic] to the founder of that Jesuit sect
which nothing could induce him to tolerate. "
|
A bad day probably, as you say.
Thanks, Sam, for the Service poem. It could be a potted version of Barry Unsworth's novel,
Stone Virgin. Some years back Tony Harrison did a commentary for a TV documentary on the Yukon in R.W. Service style. It's quite enjoyable; he includes it iin his
Collected Film Poetry.