Bulwer-Lytton

[A-37]

Here are two winners (of many) extracted from the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest:


"He was a bold man”, thought Arial Calibri, the typesetter’s daughter, “But he wouldn’t recognize a superscript if it was underlined, believed that strikethrough was a baseball term, thought Italics were people from Italy, and that Sans Serif was a Caribbean island."


For rookie detective Lara Stinson, the hardest aspect of her most recent case was not discovering that the adolescent victim had been thrown from the tenth story of the apartment building by his own 84-year old grandmother but, rather, trying to spell “defenestration by octogenarian” in her subsequent report.

 

[Rustyt1953]

I think I hear Dickens sobbing.

 

[Onomea]

I think both of those are terrific! If it’s bad writing, it’s so bad that it’s good. Made me laugh! I bet they made the authors laugh as well.

 

[Texas Star]

At least they didn't open with, "It was a dark and stormy night"

 

[Doug M.]

It was the best of tomes, it was the worst of tomes.

 

[Absalom]

At least they didn't open with, "It was a dark and stormy night"

That's actually the line that inspired the Bulwer-Lytton contest

Henry Bulwer-Lytton, 1830:
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."

 

[jmcisc]

At least they didn't open with, "It was a dark and stormy night"

I think Charles Schultz would have considered that plagiarism.....

 

[Absalom]

Okay, so here's something interesting.

Bulwer-Lytton may sound a bit bombastic, but here is the apparent first documented use of the phrase, by Washington Irving in 1809 in his "History of New York". I found an old version via googlebooks.

Talk about overwrought verbiage.