Timese
English
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From Time (magazine) + -ese.
Pronunciation
[edit]Proper noun
[edit]Timese
- (chiefly US) A style of writing found in Time magazine, especially during its early decades, characterized by exaggeration, catchy phrasing, and offbeat word order.
- 1989 March 5, “A Magazine Became a Giant”, in New York Times, retrieved 24 February 2014, page 38:
- The company's first publication was Time, a new kind of weekly magazine that chronicled the affairs of the world in a stylized prose of inverted nouns and verbs that came to be known as Timese.
- 1998 March 9, “75 Years Of Miscellany”, in Time, retrieved 30 December 2007:
- "Prosy was the first issue of Time on March 3, 1923. Yet to suggest itself as a rational method of communication, of infuriating readers into buying the magazine, was strange inverted Timestyle. It was months before [editor Briton] Hadden's impish contempt for his readers, his impatience with the English language, crystallized into gibberish. By the end of the first year, however, Timeditors were calling people able, potent, nimble. 'Great word! Great word!' would crow Hadden, coming upon 'snaggle-toothed,' 'pig-faced.' Appearing also were first gratuitous invasions of privacy. Stressed was the bastardy of Ramsay MacDonald, the 'cozy hospitality' of Mae West. Backwards ran sentences until reeled the mind." — Wolcott Gibbs, profiling Henry Luce in Timese in the New Yorker, 1936.