It really has nothing to do with either of those things. I was an Oprah admirer for years. She’s clearly brilliant, amazingly good at what she does. I just…have lost respect for her. No need to burn anyone at the stake, but I wish she would give some critical thinking to some of the stuff she promotes. I wish she would ask herself what some of the possible consequences might be of her recommendations. I personally wouldn’t recommend her show, or the shows she produces now that hers is over, because I don’t think they give responsible advice. I think Dr. Phil is pandering and exploits people. I think Dr. Oz puts the weight of his medical degree and license behind very questionable practices. I think Oprah herself has given platforms to celebrities who say dangerous things about stuff they know very little about. It’s…not good TV, in my opinion.
The problem is that a lot…and I mean A LOT, of people do worship her as if she is supernatural. Muddies things up a bit, I think, when it comes to painting her as the devil.
She might be gullible but she’s not stupid. She knows how to produce entertainment that satisfies her audience and keeps the money coming in. Which is not unlike most media moguls.
Unfortunately ( and I’m a cynic) I think that it is something much more sinister than that. I think that she simply cares more for enriching herself and making herself more well-known than she does for the people who may be harmed by the positions that she takes. And she is able to find people (Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil among them) who are also more interested in profits than hard facts.
You are disappointing me today. You want a cite that I think the idiots who watch her show and buy The Secret and give testimony with tears in their eyes worship her? I know your feels are hurt by knowing you can’t have it both ways. Either she has this amazing influence over other adults who should know better or she doesn’t. Well, she does. And I find it fascinating.
Stoidal Adventures with Fonts is emphasis driven by frustration, never rage. (In fact, on the vanishingly rare occasions when I have felt true rage in an exchange on these boards, which last happened about 12 years ago, I didn’t get very fontastic at all… nor do I in real life. I’m like my mother that way… it’s when I get quiet and controlled that I am truly angry.) I save my rage for technology.
Capitals, exclamation points, bold, color, underline, italic… all tools of emphasis.
To discern the purpose for the emphasis, the most obvious place to look is at the content of what is being emphasized and the context. Simply assuming that emphasis is only employed in the service of rage is silly, not the least reason being that it is rarely true, not only of me, but of anyone. Frustration and excitement are the two most frequent reasons, in my observation. (Frustration can morph into rage, certainly, but the degree of typographical emphasis employed is not a reliable indicator of that having happened or not.)
Dr. Oz comes off as reasonable in all that. In the second link, he recommends some vitamins in amounts less than 100% of the recommended allowance. In the third link, he lists some of Mercola’s positions and then his own. For instance, Mercola is against flu shots and Oz lists the reasons he thinks in beneficial.
I’m not seeing any endorsing of woo or advocating of woo or profiting from woo (except indirectly via ratings) from Oz.
I think based on this that you are unaware that your Adventures with Fonts tends to obscure your points, rather than making them clearer. More judicious use may help.
I would just like the record to show that I agree with Stoid’s craziness or retardation or whatever you guys want to call it concerning Oprah. But NOT concerning fonts and colors and bolding. I only used the caps as sarcasm, dammit!
She actually* lost *ratings when she first made her changes, which didn’t come until after she had crushed all competition for years:
So there’s that.
That anyone can reduce Oprah’s 25 years on television to giving Jenny McCarthy a platform and conclude she’s a worthless cunt therefore says so much more about the people who would say that than about Oprah herself, and that you don’t even realize it is simply amazing.
Your “tools of emphasis” have frequently made you look like an insane person.
In the event that you disagree with that characterization, Ms. Spock-on-a-Yoga-Mat, you may wish to revise your style guide lest the world you are addressing continue to form the wrong impression. It would be an unforgivable loss if your nuggets of wisdom were mistaken for a different, arguably less valuable kind of nugget.
I think you’re actually trying to solve a completely different problem using emphasis. Your writing is extremely dense and I think often times your points get lost in all the text. So, knowing that people tend to miss your points, you use emphasis to try to make them clearer. So, you have dense text, now messed up with a lot of font nonsense. It makes it even harder to read and more confusing.
And I am telling you that as someone who has honestly and truly tried to understand your points and has often given up. So take that for what it’s worth.