Of "wearing backward a hat" and other weird stuff

Do you know Lewis "Scooter" Libby?

He's the former Dick Cheney's right-hand man in the White House. Libby became entangled in the "Plamegate" affair and was at the end found guilty of perjury and some other charges that I don't remember at the moment.

In 1996, Libby's first and so far only novel, "The Apprentice," was published.

Set in a remote region of northern Japan in the winter of 1903, it tells a story revolving around a motley crew of people that found themselves stranded in a snowbound inn.

It's a mystery, and has gone on to becoming rather notorious for sporting stuff like this:

_The man called out to the others that the deer was still warm. He asked if they should fuck the deer._

LOL. Quite a necrophiliac bit, ain't that?

And as if it wasn't enough, here's something even more shocking:

_At age ten the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest. Groups of men paid to watch._

A remarkable cocktail of sexual perversions, eh?

Rather disturbing stuff aside, this sex-shocker of a novel has been described as convincing, compelling and well-written by several casual readers and literary critics alike with no political bones to grind.

I've recently read a review of the novel in The New Yorker [1] and there's a passage that needs attention:

_The book is brimming with quasi-political intrigue and antique locutions—"The girl who wore the cloak of yellow fur"; "one wore backward a European hat"—that make the phrase a "former Hill staffer," by comparison, seem straightforward._

First, why is "the girl who wore the cloak of yellow fur" an antique locution? Do you find it so?

I don't detect anything old-fashioned in such wording. Maybe a cloak of yellow fur is not a common dress nowadays, but that has nothing to do with locutions. The *image* the author conjures up may look antique, but the *words* by which such image is conveyed read perfectly current in my opinion.

Second, "one wore backward a European hat" is definitely a sentence that strikes me as unusual, but again, does it sound *antique* to you?

It just sounds garbled and non-idiomatic to me, as if the author was not a native speaker, while in fact this is not the case. I think that "one wore a European hat backwards" is the way a native speaker would usually phrase the sentence in question. I wonder why he chose to word it that way. To make it sound antique? I can't come up with a good reason for it, and as I said, I don't think the sentence reads like that. It just reads wrong.

Third, why is "former Hill staffer" supposed to sound non-straightforward? It's a rather plain term to my ears. Is there a joke that I don't grasp here?

Native speakers, feel free to chime in, your help will be very appreciated!

And guys, please, don't turn this thread into a political battlefield, it's against the policy of this forum, and also, discussing the idiom of the language employed in the novel is basically the only goal I have in mind as I'm posting this message.

Deers and bears tipping their hats,

Achab

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/051107ta_talk_collins

The only thing that I can think of is the sentence structure. Normally in contemporary English, we'd say 'she wore a yellow fur cloak' and 'he wore a European hat backwards', like you noticed.

Maybe - if he really knew what he was doing - he used a lot of these and well enough that they work to really contribute to the 'antique' feeling. Or, perhaps, the problem with all of this is the New Yorker. They're snobs, after all.

While I agree those sentences do sound 'garbled', I suppose you would have to read a longer passage of the book to get a real feel for the author's style. It's quite possible he used such sentences every few lines which would contribute a lot more to such an 'antique' impression than just a single stand-alone sentence.

Whether or not it is actually a proper imitation of antique writing is not that important or obvious for the average reader. There is a difference between authentic antique writing and imitation antique writing, however msot people are unclear of it, having not lived in the 19th century and such. I myself have no idea, I've read authentic old books which sounded 'garbled' and false, and also modern books that, if I didn't know better, I would swear were written a long time before the date of publication.

"And guys, please, don't turn this thread into a political battlefield, it's against the policy of this forum, and also, discussing the idiom of the language employed in the novel is basically the only goal I have in mind as I'm posting this message."

I suppose I would need the context to make a better judgment, but "one wore backward a European hat" does strike me as a sort of deliberate affectation, attempting (poorly) to sound posh, or, perhaps, "antique".

"The girl who wore the cloak of yellow fur"; "one wore backward a European hat"

Those are indeed old-fashioned sentence structures. They aren't garbled-sounding once you recognize the style, because you get used to seeing that "backward" sentence structure in older literature in school (if you are a native-speaker). English has undergone a lot of syntactical changes through time, and we've been exposed to a lot of these shifts through reading.

The "(noun) of (adjective)" structure is still used today and so isn't entirely archaic, but the pile-the-adjectives-in-front style definitely sounds more modern. "Former Hill staffer" strikes me as perfectly modern, because it follows this pattern.

Your stylistic choice there would definitely set the tone in a novel. I think it's very much in keeping with the time period you say this novel was set in -- 1903 -- and does a lot to evoke that sense of a distance in time. Honestly, so does the word "cloak" -- these days, we would be more apt to see the word "cape" used for a similar garment.