- Dec 2014
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davecormier.com davecormier.com
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“do they care?”.
Simon Ensor and I have been having 'picnic' conversations on this over the last couple of months. I have even had Hangouts of One (yes, I am a lonely dude) that are in part about this. In our picnics the question has taken another form: is it fun?
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Are you pro- or anti-emoji?
I am anti-communication. Just like the patent office said in 1865 about no new patents and what Bill Gates said about memory (yes, he really did say it-- [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/]) we don't really need new vintages do we?
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There’s a strain of Jewish humor that hinges on which word is stressed in speech, which corresponds to which word is in italics in writing.
Well...this borrowing from voice to speech is not exclusive to any culture. He just wanted an excuse to tell a joke.
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It’s not that good writers have chosen to flout a rule; it’s that the rule is not a rule in the first place. What Heller and many writers before him have never asked is: What makes a rule a rule? Who decides? Where does it come from?
This is exactly the same thinking I discuss with students when I introduce citation to them. I get the inevitable question: why do I have to do it this way? I respond with three words: tribal, logical, conventional. Not in any particular order. Linguists are descriptive, grammar marms are prescriptive. Guess who is way more interesting.
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you’d sound like a pompous jackass.
Holy, leaping jehosaphats of hyperbole, Batman. He's so hyperbolic he's asymptotic. Yeah. I said it.
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I tend not to be a pedant about Latin plurals. I like “the media are,” but I’m in a fussy minority here.
Using the connotative and negative tone of pedant shows exactly how he feels.
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Trying to embed something in here from the atlantic article
<iframe width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen="webkitallowfullscreen" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" mozallowfullscreen="mozallowfullscreen" src="<a href=" http:="" <a="" href="http://www.theatlantic.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.theatlantic.com="" video="" iframe="" 384088="" "="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">http://www.theatlantic.com/video/iframe/384088/"></iframe> OK, that didn't work. How about a YouTube vid? <iframe width="640" height="360" src="//<a href=" http:="" <a="" href="http://www.youtube.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.youtube.com="" embed="" VX07m-wahOg"="" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">www.youtube.com/embed/VX07m-wahOg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe> OK, not embeds work so far. Not even images. Inserting images using the image url just gives you a link. Was hoping for the actual image.
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astonished at how difficult they were to interpret.
similar to a telephone interview--transcripts are valuable to the visually impaired but they represent a throttling of the gestalt, the whole of voice and vision that make up the full monty that is F2F conversation.
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his grammar feud
Yeah, grammar marmism is rampant in our worlds. Some people mistake language for a machine when it is really a joshua tree or a redwood or some kind of fungus. The only disease that would kill language would be the evolution of telepathy and I don't think that would do it. To adapt Johnny Paycheck: take your rules Mr. Heller and shove 'em.
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the author and Harvard professor
Interesting choice of word order here: author and professor instead of professor and author.
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