Winners of the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the worst sentences that could be written have been announced. You can see all the winners her, but I thought I’d share my personal favorite (which was only a “runner-up” in its historical fiction category):

Primum non nocere, from the Latin for “first, do no harm,” one of the principal tenets of the Hippocratic oath taken by physicians, was far from David’s mind (as he strode, sling in hand, to face Goliath) in part because Hippocrates was born about 100 years after David, in part because David wasn’t even a physician, but mainly because David wanted to kill the sucker. — David Larson, San Francisco, CA