Dumbing down the Books

[Ransom]

I am going to have to disagree with you on “Great was the clash of their meeting” being good English."

On what basis? Your objection seems to be to style, not technical compitancy. Most buisnesses prefer writing with short sentences, little adjectives, and extreme brevity. On that basis, I can argue that most modern fiction writing is "not good English."

Technically:

Great = predicate adjective
was = trans. verb
the = article
clash = subject
of = preposition
their = pronoun
meeting = object of preposition.

Great modifies clash. The preposition describes clash. The punctuation's correct. It's just an inverted sentence akin to me saying, "A malfunction in the new package is the problem."