The Beautiful and the Damned is a snapshot of the roaring twenties, and so it seems more than appropriate that the “most unique” sentence in the book is a description of that era’s extravagant night life:
There were opera cloaks stitched of myriad, many-colored silks and furs; there were jewels dripping from arms and throats and ear-tips of white and rose; there were innumerable broad shimmers down the middles of innumerable silk hats; there were shoes of gold and bronze and red and shining black; there were the high-piled, tight-packed coiffures of many women and the slick, watered hair of well-kept men most of all there was the ebbing, flowing, chattering, chuckling, foaming, slow-rolling wave effect of this cheerful sea of people as to-night it poured its glittering torrent into the artificial lake of laughter…. After the play they parted Maury was going to a dance at Sherry’s, Anthony homeward and to bed.
This sentence was ranked by summing together the rarities of each individual word, and its high score is undoubtedly due largely to the long chains of extravagant adjectives; words that perfectly describe the wealth and energy of a high society party but that seldom show up in everyday speech.
Moving away from sums of words and instead to average rarity we instead get a sentence where the content isn’t nearly as interesting as the dialect:
She turned down here,’ he said, ‘and most steppud on me, goin’ somewhere in an awful hustle, and then a fella in short golfin’ pants come runnin’ along and went after her.
