What really drives me absolutely bananas is when people who are PAID TO WRITE cannot write.
I have spent the last week proofreading a 100,000-word book on health policy and federalism. All but one of the chapters were translated from the Spanish - in other words, written by translators, who are paid to write. And a worse collection of non-parallel structure, misuse of commas, overused conjunctions, and dangling modifiers I have never seen.
Let’s not even talk about the bibliographies. hides face in hands
Fuck it. These assholes are being paid more than I ever have to write copy that wouldn’t have gotten a 30% in the Writing Techniques course I just got more than 90% in. Well, at least it means I can get a job proofreading it.
Although I see the Nazi thing as an exaggeration, I guess that the point people who use it are trying to make is that the Nazis killed the Jews based on their lack of conformity into the German lifestyle. That lack of conformity was purely based on the social appearance of the Jews extolled by the Nazi party. When you go through a post and kill it based on its appearance, not its content, you’re operating under the same assumptions. That would make it a correct, if exaggerated, analogy.
Reading an entire post: is to, Discounting it solely on grammar/spelling issues. As, Interviewing a man: is to, Discounting him based on a minor staph infection.
She didn’t do a very good job of demonstrating that. When I see emotionally infused arguments it’s generally the first sign that the person on the other end of the table is on hollow earth. I love her incredibly not ignorant comment about testosterone infusion. Anybody with testosterone must be guilty of something. After all, THIS board is about fighting ignorance.
>Reading an entire post: is to, Discounting it solely on grammar/spelling issues. As, Interviewing a man: is to, Discounting him based on a minor staph infection.
I see you are keeping on the “weak analogies” topic. To make the analogy stronger, say it is a job interview and the guy shows up in dirty clothes. Sure, you can judge him ONLY on his qualifications, but as an employer, you will also make immediate decisions about his professionalism. You will think, “if he doesn’t bother cleaning up for the interview, he probably won’t put much effort into his work, either.”
And you’d be right.
>I guess that the point people who use it are trying to make is that the Nazis killed the Jews based on their lack of conformity into the German lifestyle.
They aren’t trying to make a point at all. They are as lazy with their analogies as they are with their spelling. Someone dares to criticize them! They must be Nazis! It’s a lazy knee-jerk assholish and self-centered reaction. Those mental deficits will reveal themselves in their arguments anyway. Take you, for example. Every post has laughable spelling and grammatical errors, and you’ve also demonstrated a laziness with your arguments, using bad analogies, quoting sources that don’t even make your point, not reading other people’s posts, willfully ignoring refuting evidence. I say it’s no coincidence.
Jerk, I’m missing your point. He seems to have replied to what you said pretty much dead on, and if you think he missed the point, state it more clearly so he can reply to it.
Canvas, try not to be quite so condescending (specifically “buh bye now” - I hate that), please.
There was no point in “demonstrating that”. It was quite clear from your posts and actions, and over the top response to someone disagreeing with you on a really very simple and neutral subject.
You stated a point, I disagreed with it, and in your own slightly street-slanged words you said “if you want it, it’s on”. As if this were some barfight or threat to you. Which makes my reference to your testosterone fit quite accurate.
A simple discussion re: why I believed as I did, and why you believed as you did would have been reasonable. You, for some odd (didn’t get enough sleep? GF/BF piss you off?) took this VERY personally, and issued a challenge that was way out of place given th subject.
Given any subject reallly. I withdrew because there was no point in being involved in what YOU were determined to make into some childish “winner takes all” street fight. Not interesting, not thinkng on your part, in fact boring and odd. You took what could have been an interesting discussion and just got “stupid with it”. Very odd attitude, again, especially given the extremely neutral OP.
I feel sorry for you, if you get this worked up regarding the subject on which I expressed disagreement with you, you must be pretty tightly wound.
Missing the pont of a post and making emotional arguments again are you?
Street fight? yup… that’s what I was going for. I was going to reach through your screen then it would be “winner take all” for me.
Seriously canvas if you read through the post you will see that you were the fist one to bring out the petty personal insults. What I did was an introduction to a relevant discussion, but you couldn’t keep up with it. “By the way, your argument attributing the same qualities to math and language is very incorrect. Math uses symbols to represent an absolute knowledge. Language doesn’t express an absolute knowledge and is, therefore, inherently different.”
You haven’t even refuted my statement, all your doing is coming up with an irrelevant and histrionic argument in which you can never see your own responsibility for the outcome.
“ Yes you did, but I’ll leave it at that if you do” If you didn’t understand what this meant when I posted it, let me explain. I was dropping the personal factor. Apparently you haven’t.
“I feel sorry for you” Personal, emotional and irrelevant to any real discussion you seem to be trying to nurture.
Now back to the point…
** Eli**
“They aren’t trying to make a point at all” no, you’re right most of them aren’t. But some of them are and that doesn’t make it any less true.
“Every post has laughable spelling and grammatical errors“-- really, every post?
, and you’ve also demonstrated a laziness with your arguments, using bad analogies“-- Which you haven’t been able to refute except by mirroring them.
“quoting sources that don’t even make your point, not reading other people’s posts, willfully ignoring refuting evidence.”-- not in this thread, I seem to be able to move on. May be it’s my ability to think outside of rules (and misspell things), or maybe its because you can’t win your argument on this thread alone.
“It’s a lazy knee-jerk assholish and self-centered reaction. “-- kind of like correcting their spelling? By the way “assholish” isn’t a word. (did that add anything to my argument?)
And do I have to make the pot calling the kettle black argument about this whole thread?
the whole (fillintheblank)nazi is way over done and on the way to being carbonized. (MHO)
I routinely will skip posts that are in leet speak, or from those who refuse to use punctuation and capitalization, 'cause I find them too difficult to read.
Spelling errors (unless they end up being really funny ones) I’ll usually ignore and assume as typos’ or the like. and I’m more likely to simply spell it correctly (except I’m guilty often of typos myself, and there’s the whole poor vision thing, too where I don’t always see my errors) myself in a reply than do the whole {quote} blah bleh (sic) blah {/quote} thing, or make a specific ‘it’s spelled blah’ type of thing.
grammar errors, unless it makes the post undecipherable, I’ll generally just mentally roll my eyes at.
what does tend to annoy me is bad coding - not coding errors where some one forgets the end bracket, but that wholesale laziness of copy/paste a post 'cause you don’t want to bother learning how to code correctly, especially when it (as it often does) goes along with a poster repeating a complicated sequence of post/reply/comment. When we can’t tell who is saying what, the entire idea of communication of ideas gets lost.
Often when folks correct spelling (as happens), I notice that it’s generally done by some one who is disagreeing with the point the poster is making. when I see that happen, I tend to think less of the poster doing the correcting, and ‘hear’ it in a snide tone of voice. and I think it detracts from the point that either are making.
Pro’lly made sufficient errors in this post to make the grammar/spelling nazis happy.
No, I didnt miss it, I disagreed with it. There’s a difference.
You again; No, you didn’t address the point that I made but, you cited it. If you want to make this personal its on.
The above statement is what I’m referring to. I disagreed with you opinion so you’ve decided that meant I was “making it personal” and that it should be 'on"? That’s a really macho “on the fight” attitude. And that statement is what my subsequent posts were referring to as “testosterone fit”.
Uh huh… Wanting to “make it personal” and stating “its on” is
an "introduction to a relevent discussion. I see.
No, and if you’ll look you’ll see that I FIRST declined to “make it personal” or having it “on”. And that I preferred to simply discuss it. But you ignored that and preferred to continue being snide for no reason.
The comment about you being emotional and having a testosterone fit was accurate given your apparent desire for “making it personal” and having it on.
Because instead of addressing, or asking this, and only this, you first shot out of the starting gate with the unnecessary and unprovoked “If you want to make this personal it’s on” statement.
As to my analogy. I did NOT say that math and english were equivalent disciplines. The comment that I DID make was that in a post where a minor mathematical mistake, one that LIKE misspellings, does NOT affect the point of the post, people feel free to call the poster on those and correct misinformation.
[/quote]
“ Yes you did, but I’ll leave it at that if you do” If you didn’t understand what this meant when I posted it, let me explain. I was dropping the personal factor. Apparently you haven’t.
[/quote]
Well, your sentence structure, especially tense, leaves much to be desired. You weren’t answering a comment I’d said with it. Stating “yes you did” infers that I’d said I didn’t do something. I didn’t say, in my post previous to that one “no I didn’t” to anything. And the but i’ll leave it at that if you do" Again, my comments previous to this post of yours stated nothing that I’d said “I do”.
What I was asking, and what I couldn’t figure out was, from my post prior to that, why you felt you needed to “make it personal” in the first place. All I said was “I disagree”. The post before that was strictly lining out what it was that I disagreed with. Period. That’s “insulting and emotional”?
Well, one thing for sure, you have me curious. Do please explain what it was that made you think I was wanting to “make it personal”?
It’s funny how, now that I’ve lined out the sequence of posts, and you can see that you really were going off on a weird tangent for no reason last night, that all you can come up with (after all your claims of aloofness, and just wanting "introduce discusion), is blah blah blah.
> “They aren’t trying to make a point at all” no, you’re right most of them aren’t. But some of them are and that doesn’t make it any less true.
It doesn’t make them any MORE true either. I think I have provide sufficient reason why the spelling nazi analogy is a weak one, and trite.
> “Every post has laughable spelling and grammatical errors“-- really, every post?
Let me check… yep.
>, and you’ve also demonstrated a laziness with your arguments, using bad analogies“-- Which you haven’t been able to refute except by mirroring them.
My use of a stronger analogy had exactly the effect of demonstrating the lameness of your own. To put it more simply: having a staph infection is not necessarily due to the sloppiness and carelessness of the infected (although it may be). Bad spelling/grammar is more akin to bad dress, where judgments made about the person’s other qualities MAY be inaccurate, but are NOT unfair, because they do indicate aspects of personality that relate to those other qualities. A person who is lazy and sloppy in one regard will, in all likelihood, be lazy and sloppy in other regards. Remember that readers are under no obligation to read your opinions at all. It is your job to present them with a compelling case, and a readable one.
> “quoting sources that don’t even make your point, not reading other people’s posts, willfully ignoring refuting evidence.”-- not in this thread, I seem to be able to move on. May be it’s my ability to think outside of rules (and misspell things), or maybe its because you can’t win your argument on this thread alone.
No, in this thread you have proved yourself to be the same insufferable jerk you have been in other threads. You particularly strike me as someone who refuses to read or comprehend posts, but only copies-pastes-argues against them.
> “It’s a lazy knee-jerk assholish and self-centered reaction. “-- kind of like correcting their spelling? By the way “assholish” isn’t a word. (did that add anything to my argument?)
Assholish is a perfectly legitimate word in slang. See
What it really comes down to is this…
After seeing the difference between our two analogies the fact that are views are very different became apparent. Mine wasn’t weaker than yours, it proposed a different valuation certain skills.
Eli has a masters in English, I’m going to assume that meant 5 years of studying English. For most of those five years He/She/It has been surrounded by people who were studying a similar topic. This would skew a person’s view on the topic of English to the point that a person, with this background, would be unable to realize that some of us have spent that same amount of time on a different topic of study. Because we haven’t spent five years studying a topic we don’t view it to be as important as someone who has spent that much time studying it.
The difference is that when you make a mistake in my given area of expertise, I don’t call you lazy and inherently stupid. I don’t do this because I know that everyone hasn’t given the topic, that I studied, as much thought.
I think that when someone takes 5 years of education, and applies what they learned from it to be a given in all other people, that they have made a mistake of perspective. To put this perspective onto other people and use it to read into their persona is a flawed notion of reality. This flawed notion has lead you to deceive yourself into an ignorance you are not aware exists. Take a half second and consider all the things you learned in your education and then take that same amount of time consider all the things you did not. Obviously there will be an imbalance in one of these two things. If you exposed everything you didn’t consider relevant, but others did, when ever you spoke, I’m sure I could have the same problem with you.
