Recently I was singing a paean of praise – a redundancy, perhaps, for aren’t all paeans in praise of something? – of the period, but the column suffered (a common failing when a column runs more than 750 words) from omission – it did not consider the em-dash. Aaargh!

The foregoing hash of a sentence is deliberately inedible. We are talking today of Writer’s Interruptus, a stylistic device that relies upon parenthetical phrases to derail a reader’s train of thought.

On Sept. 3, columnist George Will was writing about Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California zoo. He said:

“Having intimated that he would finance his own campaign – he would not be beholden to ‘special interests’ because ‘I don’t need to take money from anyone; I have plenty of money myself’ – he quickly solicited $3.1 million from contributors, for starters.”

After a pause, my brother Will continued:

“But it is clear that Schwarzenegger, although from Austria, has an attribute that Matthew Arnold ascribed to – the 19th century did not know that stereotypes are naughty – Celtic people: a ‘passionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact.”‘

Will turned to candidate Cruz Bustamente, who is telling Californians to brace themselves for “tough love.”

“By that he means he will solve their problems by making taxation of the rich even heavier – in 2000, almost 38 percent of California income taxation was paid by one-third of 1 percent of taxpayers. … And, oh yes, there will be cheaper gasoline prices when Gov. Bustamente, displaying insouciant disregard for the U.S. Constitution – it makes the regulation of interstate commerce a federal prerogative – imposes state regulation on the petroleum industry.”

My brother concluded with a warning that Schwarzenegger could expect a “late hit” from his foes – an unsavory revelation just before the election. Late hits are familiar blows in California politics. “In 1998 Darrell Issa – he is now a congressman; his $1.6 million funding of the recall petition drive produced this recall election – lost a Senate primary when it was revealed that he had embellished his military record.”

Somewhere in all this tangled shrubbery were nouns in desperate search of verbs. Parental clauses had mislaid their orphan predicates. Prepositions had lost their objects. Devoted readers – and George Will has millions of devoted readers; they welcome his cogent conservative thinking, not only in his widely syndicated column but also in his television commentaries, in which his acerbic wit enables him to skewer his unprepared adversaries – have learned to leap the dashes and stay the course. You bet.

Another of my favorite writers, Janet Maslin of The New York Times, occasionally indulges in Writer’s Interruptus. Novelist Chuck Palahniuk, she wrote, “is someone whose idea of bedtime music (in ‘Lullaby,’ the novel preceding this one) is a song that actually kills its listeners.”

Reviewing a biography of Diana Mosley, again she fell into parenthetical arms: “Diana was a cousin of Winston Churchill’s, a darling of Evelyn Waugh’s (who dedicated ‘Vile Bodies’ to the Guinnesses) and a likely friend of Lytton Strachey’s and Dora Carrington’s, even if she found Bloomsbury tastes ‘dreary’ and ‘middle-class’; Diana’s own aesthetic ran toward pink, blue and gold luxe.”

A writer in The New Republic commented that plenty of liberal Catholic intellectuals believe that God “should be pre-eminent in society.” More important, “why does being an anti-communist during the cold war, or someone who wishes for the spread of a belief in God and in ‘moral values’ (is there a large and restless constituency out there that doesn’t believe in some kind of moral values?), get identified, without qualification, with a ‘hostility to liberalism’?”

This is not so much deathless prose as breathless prose. Mind you, I am not suggesting that all our sentences be short ones, or that parenthetical phrases be put on a list of stylistic no-nos. My old-fashioned thought is that as a general rule, prepositions and their objects should at least hold hands. Subjects ought to be on intimate terms with their predicates. Why make them sleep in separate beds?

James Kilpatrick is a syndicated columnist.

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