Casey

“Mrs. Hazzard chided me gently about my pomposity (which I fear has grown only more pronounced as the years have passed), once stopping me when I used the word heretofore. “Heretofore, Mr. Van Tassel?” she asked. And while heretofore may not be a particularly defensible word, I did argue that as a professor of English Literature, one had to decry the more simple (and, to my ear, bereft) speech of today’s discourse, since it constricted one’s vocabulary and did not allow one to parse the moment—dissect the moment, as it were—with clause upon clause upon clause (boxes within boxes within boxes, I so often think). She mulled this over a bit and then said she enjoyed speaking with me nevertheless, and that she found me charmingly amusing.”
― Anita Shreve, All He Ever Wanted