I’m afraid I don’t have very much ire, so I’m just going to exercise my right to be pissier than the other thread would allow. ^^
First off: I’m incredibly egotistical and opinionated. I don’t deny that. But I also like to tell myself that when it comes to the stuff I’m egotistical about, I’m also fairly consistent in not producing or accepting bullshit. We all like to decieve ourselves, so who knows whether that’s right. What I do know, however, is that I don’t hold my subject expertise (which I mainly got through a combonation of time invested and extremely good teachers) over anyone’s head.
Now in the linked thread, I was having lots of fun answering some questions and getting frusterated at others, all in all a rousing time. What pisses me off, however, is the tone guizot takes when answering questions; he’s arrogant, his answers tend to be imprecise and poorly written, and I’ve been reading a nauseating amount of ego from the bulk of his posts. He rarely questions himself, and never encourages other people to participate: he swoops in, takes a gigantic shit from the textbook of his choice, and leaves me with the feeling that he’s not going to be satisfied unless he’s right, damn the consequences.
I got sick of his shit, got mad, called bullshit, and demanded a cite for some of his more bizarre claims, and the essence of his reply boils down to an equally agressive (and equally inappropriate) “You don’t know shit, go justify my claims yourself because I can’t waste my precious time responding to you”.
I guess all I’m saying is that if he can’t waste his time justifying half of what he says, I’d really rather he shut the fuck up.
(And for the record, I’m using wikipedia because the entire point of that thread was to field technical questions in a reasonably nontechnical manner, and wiki is nothing if not understandable.)
Heehee, that’s pretty much what I’m doing. I AM egotistical though, so I felt like getting a parting “I might be an asshole, but at least I’m a useful one!” dig in first.
Plus, I just really don’t like pretention: this IS nothing more than a pissing context between nerds (which is too bad: a cage fight sounds like it would be funnier), but in general the scholars I respect the most are the ones who are fairly normal people that just happen to be really, really smart.
And somehow I have trouble being impressed by someone who has to shove your nose in their education every five minutes. It usually means there’s a reason they can’t show it directly. :rolleyes:
Yeah, I had my own run-in with Guizot in that thread; I cut it off because I consider grammar terminology to be pretty far afield from the purpose of the thread, and because that twit’s response to my post was so poorly constructed that I couldn’t tell what was quoted and what was original.
I also found, as our OP mentions, that he simply refused to actually answer any questions or respond directly to new information; he just pumped out more restatements of his opinion, like a fog machine.
Oh, I totally agree with you! I’m not claiming to be complacent here at all: I’m egotistical and self-centered, but I at least like to think that I’m also correct, and believe that I’m honest enough to admit when I’m wrong. Guiznot just starts out assuming he’s correct, however, and gets pissy when someone challenges him: “You’re allowed to challenge me but that means you’re stupid so go read a book” isn’t quite as mature a response as I’d been hoping for. (and remember, messageboard etiquette is much more mature than university etiquette: calling bullshit like I did would be considered mean, but within acceptable limits if I were right. ^_~)
And thank you for mentioning the spelling! I figured he might’ve stuck his lexicon so far up his grapheme parser that whenever he tried to form a coherent sentence it ended with him burping up random letters which his synesthesia would allow him to quickly and efficiently assemble into something roughly resembling what he wanted to say, and whenever he’d eaten a bad lunch the ensuing diarrhea bypassed his intestines and went straight to his mouth, causing him to shit all over the thread… but that’s just my two cents.
(I LIKE the idea of linguist arguments! Like freestyle battles, only a lot less sensical. )
It doesn’t, really. Linguistics is primarily concerned with spoken language, to which spelling is obviously unrelated. Further, spelling rules are prescriptivist in nature (“you should spell this word this way”) which is not what linguistics is concerned with.
That said, there does seem to be an anal-retentiveness needed for linguistics that often translates to spelling well.
Anyone pointing out the inconsistency in preposition placement in the middle two sentences can suck it
Judging by the last pit matches and most of the GD threads I’ve been in, this is standard operating procedure on the SDMB.
Now, degenerate in to inexplicable hate-mongering, alert the ever-ready Jackals of the Dope that there’s a pile-on, and let penis ensue. that’ll about do it I think
