Worst sentence* in the English language
Recently I found myself recalling a decades-old conversation with my uncle about grammar. (Pause so you might yawn. Now would be a good time to change tabs. No?—okay, moving on.) I should admit that ’recently’ is a lie—I recall the conversation every time I see an onion. Particularly multiple onions; onions in a row tend to make me chuckle to myself. If the first two are offset slightly, that’s additionally funny.
Let me explain the lingering effect of what I consider the worst sentence in English*.
The conversation started with my appreciation that my school-assigned copy of “The Last of the Mohicans” came with an afterword—one of Mark Twain’s best take-downs—“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”. After my comments about Twain’s piece, my book-collecting uncle chimed in with his favorite recollected literary offense. (We’re an equal-opportunity-geekout family.) At least two decades later, I recalled the following: “She should not have partook, because of the known redolence of onions, onions.”
Guessing my version decayed over time, I asked my uncle if he recalled the conversation and sentence. He was delighted to share what he remembered of the quote: “She ate, thought she should have eaten (because of the known redolence of) onions, onions, onions.”. It’s much more interesting with a third onion and a parenthetical. I had a feeling there were three onions but couldn’t recall the prepositional phrase.
Then, with a characteristic family research tic, my uncle updated his own e-mail with:
STOP PRESS — FOUND IT
Burgess’s “Enderby Outside”: “Then, instead of expensive mouthwash, he had breathed on Hogg-Enderby, bafflingly (for no banquet would serve, because of the known redolence of onions, onions) onions.”
So there you have it. …Bafflingly (onions, onions) onions. It is surprisingly hard to build a comprehensible sentence with that pattern. I will not be reading “Enderby” anytime soon.
* Professionally published English, I suppose. Unprofessionally semi-published English has its own horrors.
