The Idiot Behind the Iron Mask

While reading up on banking today, I had the misfortune of encountering the longest sentence ever:

“By authority, the only duties in connection with the operation of a current bank account that a customer owed to his bank, in the absence of express agreement, were a duty to exercise due care in drawing cheques so as not to facilitate fraud or forgery, and a duty to notify the bank immediately of any unauthorised cheques of which he became aware; that no wider duty, requiring a customer to take reasonable precautions in the management of his business to prevent forged cheques being presented to the bank for payment, or to take such steps as a reasonable customer would to check the periodic bank statements in order to be able to notify the bank of any items which were not, or might not have been, authorised, could be implied into banking contracts as a necessary incident of the relationship of banker and customer, and that, therefore, the banks were not relieved by any breach of duty by the company from having to bear the loss occasioned by the forged cheques.”

My first thought: Holy crap.

The wanton use of abstract words, continuous shifting between tense usages, disparate ideas (made all the more confusing by excessive and arbitrarily placed commas), and misguided use of a semicolon; all of it, packaged to fit nicely into just one sentence.

If that isn’t bad English, I don’t know what is.

——

Update: Still interested? Laugh and learn with The Bad Writing Contest. Here’s a quick steal:

“With the last gasp of Romanticism, the quelling of its florid uprising against the vapid formalism of one strain of the Enlightenment, the dimming of its yearning for the imagined grandeur of the archaic, and the dashing of its too sanguine hopes for a revitalized, fulfilled humanity, the horror of its more lasting, more Gothic legacy has settled in, distributed and diffused enough, to be sure, that lugubriousness is recognizable only as languor, or as a certain sardonic laconicism disguising itself in a new sanctification of the destructive instincts, a new genius for displacing cultural reifications in the interminable shell game of the analysis of the human psyche, where nothing remains sacred.”

Lovely.