Ewwww...thanks, I'd never thought that of "plethora" before! :^P
I simply dislike it because it always seemed in uni writing classes that it was the word that people tossed around when they wanted a fifty-cent word to make them sound impressive. It doesn't sound impressive; it sounds like someone dug too deeply into the thesaurus while trying to sound impressive.
I suppose that I'm extra-picky when it comes to culture in movies or books because I tend to focus on it in my own writing. Writing from one's own PoV is simply not much of a challenge, and some of the most brilliant movies I've seen have shown a cultural PoV where--at the end of the movie--I had to shake my head and wonder what it said about me that I was starting to understand. Downfall is one about the last days of Hitler's regime; Paradise Now is about Palestinian suicide bombers; both are excellent examples of how a movie can show a "bad" cultural trait and show the audience how it is possible for ordinary people to believe in it.
Letters wasn't all bad on this count either, but it did have a tendency to portray the independent characters as less foolish than those who embraced the actual ideals of that era. It's not that I agree with that outlook either, but I would like to understand it more, and Letters--as much as I did like it--didn't make too much progress in that regard.
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rosecarmine
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-16 01:43 am (UTC)I simply dislike it because it always seemed in uni writing classes that it was the word that people tossed around when they wanted a fifty-cent word to make them sound impressive. It doesn't sound impressive; it sounds like someone dug too deeply into the thesaurus while trying to sound impressive.
I suppose that I'm extra-picky when it comes to culture in movies or books because I tend to focus on it in my own writing. Writing from one's own PoV is simply not much of a challenge, and some of the most brilliant movies I've seen have shown a cultural PoV where--at the end of the movie--I had to shake my head and wonder what it said about me that I was starting to understand. Downfall is one about the last days of Hitler's regime; Paradise Now is about Palestinian suicide bombers; both are excellent examples of how a movie can show a "bad" cultural trait and show the audience how it is possible for ordinary people to believe in it.
Letters wasn't all bad on this count either, but it did have a tendency to portray the independent characters as less foolish than those who embraced the actual ideals of that era. It's not that I agree with that outlook either, but I would like to understand it more, and Letters--as much as I did like it--didn't make too much progress in that regard.