Saturday, January 21, 2012

maddening crowd: Entry for Saturday, January 21, 2012

maddening crowd
When Thomas Hardy titled one of his novels Far from the Madding Crowd he was quoting a phrase from Thomas Gray’s 1750 poem “Elegy on a Country Churchyard” which used the archaic spelling “madding.” The only reason to refer to “madding crowds” is to show how sophisticated you are; but if you update the spelling to “maddening” it will have the opposite effect: you’ll look ignorant.

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