ABSTRACT
The author refers to a great disorientating tradition only by the names of William Wordsworth and Ernest Hemingway; and the two worthies will serve to encompass two-way transatlantic malpractices. What they have in common, in their impact on the journalistic style of one's times, is their absolutistic commitments to the speech of common men, to the vocabulary of rhythms of natural conversation, as the proper carrier of discourse and communication. For Wordsworth it represented the break with classical artificiality, with "gaudiness and inane phraseology". For Hemingway it was the great heavyweight challenge to "get it right", to pin the truth to the mat, to knock off the excess fat, to be lean and simple and powerful. This literary aesthetic has impinged on especially American journalism, and this in an extraordinary way: so much so that it is difficult to find an elegant sentence, or a well-fashioned paragraph, or a sharply tuned phrase in the immense output of American daily newspapers.
