“In essence, we note there are two large demographic bodies that resemble one another in the extent of their cognitive impairment: brain-dead politicians and brain-dead electorates. They are not necessarily coterminous. In some nations, one predominates; in others, another. Sometimes the two dispensations are found in sync.
In European nations such as the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Romania, and of course in the higher echelons of the EU itself, the political class is plainly suffering from an access of both mental impairment and historical ignorance, receding into the very totalitarian past they were reconstructed to avert…”
The word he intended to use was “excess” and not “access“, a mistake which kind of undercuts his verbose use of words such as “coterminous” and “dispensations” (“conditions”, surely?).
I quit reading the piece after that, because I couldn’t trust that the writer (and the editor) understood the topic.
I quote, and not for the first time, the late Roger Moore’s excellent statement:
“The point of language is to communicate your thoughts in the shortest possible time and in the clearest possible way.”
This writer fails on both counts, repeatedly. No wonder A.I. is taking over.
Ah, Occam’s Razor: ‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.’
At first I thought you were quoting Cicero, but that old gasbag would have taken several paragraphs to say that.
I see that you too have had to translate his works! Take heart and remember that his speeches are ‘corrected’: they’re not exactly what he said but what he decided he should have said.
Roger Moore’s second ‘in’ was superfluous.
Actually, I think I missed a comma, in which case it’s not superfluous.
“Access” meaning “onset”, is outdated usage, and the writer could have chosen a better turn of phrase. But it is grammatically correct.
Even worse. That’s like using words out of the Book of Common Prayer, e.g. “vouchsafe”.
“suffering from an access of both mental impairment and historical ignorance”
Guessing that they all belong to a closed circle-jerk of like-minded beings, perhaps they do suffer from a lack of access. Voluntarily self-imposed of course.
Or he was using speech to text assistance so as to avoid the drudgery of actually typing. But he forgot that whatever method is used to put characters on the page, proof-reading is a necessity