Dear Mr. Buckley: In a recent column, you wrote: “The Taliban has taken unmarried women detected in pregnancy and buried them to neck level before execution.” Your sentence reminded me of an unrelated problem with English.
To mean “unmarried pregnant women,” why is English so infecund as to need three words? You appear to have grappled with “unmarried pregnant women” before conceiving five words, “unmarried women detected in pregnancy,” as if you could avoid propagating adjectives by begetting precision.
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