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I don't quite know what to make of the following other than as writing, it's more preening than craft:
"Why does it feel like autumn? I am not referring to the weather, which has been almost unseasonably hot in many parts of the country, but to something else one sees venturing outdoors or turning on the television: our great cities emptied out, like clusters of silver birches, save for the tens of thousands of people massed together in stratonic clusters: fallen leaves."
These are the opening lines from a recent op-ed.
First of all, I had to look up "stratonic". I'm pretty sure that the author must have meant "stratified", for fallen leaves cluster (here a weak usage, IMO, but I'll play along) in strata (layers). All my sources say that "stratonic" should either mean "pertaining to things military", or even less likely here, "pertaining to the Greek philosopher Strato of Lampsacus" - so it's a word I'll definitely make a point of never using, on general principle. But even "stratified" is a misuse, for when people mass together, they tend, like the author's imagined silver birches, to do so upright, only in less rooted fashion: strata do not mill about. I think we can also dismiss the possibility that he meant social strata. I have no objections to poetic seasoning in a prose work, but even license has limits beyond which lies vapid nonsense. You can't beat your Muse into submission, never mind with misappropriated gobbledygook like "stratonic". The rest of my objections are about the opening's jagged compositional style and indulgence in ill-resolved contradiction, and its nonexistent relationship to the rest of the article - so I'll leave off here.
Discuss, if you have the stomach for it.
_________________
"Time is the wisest counselor of all." - Pericles
"I remain not entirely convinced of it." - Nano
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