The curse of “Of course”. The urge to write “of course” during an essay or a piece is one which comes out of pure arrogance. It is suggesting that you know something that everyone knows, appealing to the intelligence of the reader and hence shaming them when your obscure fact does not leap out at them. “Of course” is needless, pointless as an appelation – and hubris. It also has a much better chance at flaggin up an error, as in this case from the Judith Hawley review of Armand Marie Leroi’s Mutants in the Guardian Review this Saturday.
In a highly quotable dictum in this thought-provoking and aphoristic book, Armand Leroi declares: “We are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others.” The expression recalls, of course, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four…
Of course I make this kind of error all the time.