Peter B, a most curious though observant character, had long had suspicions that the reading public was becoming simple-minded, indeed that their attention spans had become so constricted, their vision so limited, that they were unable to hold within their consciousnesses sentences of more than a few lines, a distressing phenomenon that he had come to associate with the baleful influence of Hemingway, whom he otherwise adored, and though his worldview was pedantic, perhaps some might say antiquated, it did not seem, at least to him, akin to legal transgression, and so he was thunderstruck, as if by a bolt from the blue, when, waking one morning, he found himself yanked unceremoniously from his nightly slumbers by the local constables, who now deemed, apparently unable to cope with his excesses any longer, that the regular pattern of cumulative syntax into which he had fallen of late, the habit of piling one free modifier upon another, and of appending to every coordinate clause an interminable accordion-like construction of subordinate clauses that even the most devoted admirer of Palin-speak couldn't fathom, much less diagram, had now become something more serious than a mere misdemeanor, a simple violation, but rather constituted a form of violence, albeit a restrained a humorously purposeful one, and so it was deemed that in the public interest, and because these Postmodern excesses of verbiage perhaps constituted a peculiar form of aggression, at least against the ear, that swift and decisive punitive action must be taken against the offender to bring him back into line, and yet in a way that would seem reasonable to the reading public, and so the decision was made that he should, it goes without saying, first be granted all the liberties of a trial by a jury of his peers — which presented problems enough! —and then punished regardless of the outcome of the aforesaid proceedings, and so the date was set and the 'offender' was remanded into the State's custody, where he waited for the swift justice that his State's constitution proclaimed was his inalienable right, until one day, after he had spent what seemed to be years in prison engaged in the writing of massively parallel and ramblingly discursive essays, he was brought before the aforesaid jury of his peers (finally and miraculously assembled), and was treated to the sight of a spectacle seldom known since the days of the Roman Coliseum, as one legal lion after another was released to do battle against him, against his seemingly imperishable word, and as the charges against him were laid out, like surgical instruments in an operating room, his mind slowly began to grasp the enormity of the complaints arrayed against him, he began to grasp that what he stood accused of — his unpardonable sin — was that of composing monumentally complex syntactical structures, byzantine in their complexity and rococo in their sensibilities, with so many free modifiers, so many rhetorical figures, so many words, that they amounted to a form of generalized aggression against both society and ear, aggression against the whole concept of concision, indeed aggression against all that the practiced grammarian holds most dear, and so little leniency was granted in sentencing him for his verbal transgressions, for his studied habit of taking what is most holy in our ever more self-defeating society which mistakes verbal economy for clarity and disregards expressiveness altogether, and the maximum punitive power of an outraged community was brought to bear on this rambling fellow, indeed a punishment at once draconian and yet ironically appropriate in light of the charges originally brought against him, and so no one as much as flinched when the judge ordered what was for the defendant a not so undesirable punishment: a long sentence!

jb, surely you have heard that self-righteous BS is no longer tolerated here. I was having fun! Stand up and work that sheet of paper from twixt your cheeks. You seem a bit tense.