And hereare the cites which were subsequently ignored in order to keep the focus on the personal rather than the factual.
Actually, giving this more thought, if that first link–to the pit thread–is in fact one of the reasons for my reputation, then it doesn’t really matter if it was in the pit. It was a childish and petty attack, a purely emotional response to a subject that didn’t even interest me. I grew up being regularly beaten by an alcoholic professional football player, and I have a literally physical aversion to the sound of a football game on television. Professional sports have always seemed to me–no doubt because of my specific background–to be, at BEST, exercises in dry statistics and rules. Certainly, I never thought of them as in any way a visual experience. The thought that someone would spend a great deal of money on a HD system to experience what my grandfather still listens to on the radio, frankly bewildered me. And so I dropped an insult bomb. I “got away with it” because it was a pit thread, but if that post has followed me around as “proof” that I can be a jerk, I have to plead guilty and apologize; I was certainly a jerk in that thread, pit-rules notwithstanding.
Actually, I look at that list and say “Wow! Lissener must be the greatest piece of ass on the West coast!”
(can’t seem to stop with the jokes, but hey Lissener pitting ain’t what it used to be.)
Hey, Evil Captor, I’m not going to try to defend lissener for his behavior. That’s not my job. I don’t know the man; I barely read any threads he participates in, and when I do, I don’t really acknowledge or remember who made which post. I have no beef against lissener and I have no particular love for him.
But you of all people should know that when some dumbass poster starts a dumbass Pit thread and makes some dumbass mistakes, people are entitled to jump on his shit.
Justin has proved in this thread that he’s so eager to attack lissener for being arrogant, snide, and dishonest that he (Justin) has turned off his brain and ignored several reasonable, even probable alternatives, including the possibility that lissener may be, you know, telling the fucking truth. (Claims of arrogance and snidi… ness… may have to stand trial yet. I don’t care about that part.) I mean, holy jumped-up Christ on a claque, did you see Justin’s fucking moronic statement about how lissener must have, must have, no way around it, MUST HAVE learned about movies in his capacity as a video store clerk? I mean, JESUS, that’s just stooooopid.
So I’m going to continue to jump on Justin’s shit, because he’s fucking stupid. Not because he’s attacking anybody in particular.
Every since he came back from banning, lissener has been much less confrontational. All I really read is the Pit so all I see are people complaining about him and his response to their accusations. Before his banning he would have been bouncing off the walls and going totally ape shit by now. Every since his return he seems to have a very “water off a duck’s back” sort of attitude when he gets pitted. As someone who has seen his share of meltdowns and trainwrecks (notably by lissener himself) I wanted lissener to know that his change of attitude in the Pit had been noticed (whether intentional or not) and, I at least, view it as a positive.
Thanks. I often bemoan the fact that no transgression goes unnoticed, while non-transgressions–all the times I’ve kept my mouth shut, as it were–necessarily aren’t as visible. I should keep track of them, and keep a running thread of "Things I could’ve said, but didn’t . . . " 
Anyone who really wants the facts on the subject can read my original pit thread, which exhaustively discusses the matter. Your posts on the question in this thread demonstrate you to be both an idiot and a liar. If you think you were right on the topic, you are delusional.
Case in point. The only comment I have had previously in this thread was to defend Cervaise, who was defending you. I did not bring up the matter here; someone else did, and you were the one who made it a point of expanding on it at length. You are a liar to claim I “bring it up at every opportunity.”
You’ll understand if I take the word of the multiple authoritative sources I tracked down and documented, rather than the anecdotal “gut” of some dude on the internet who offered ZERO backing evidence beyond an informal poll of his friends. The dishonesty here is that you would NEVER take this gut-v-fact position on any other subject, and with any other poster than me you’d be on the side of fact, not gut. But whatever; you refuse to discuss this anywhere but the Pit, because you’re a coward and know that if it were discussed with the rational discipline that tends (tends, I said) to rule the tone in GD and GQ, facts would outweigh gut and my cites would get the acknowledgment they’d have gotten if they were posted by anyone but me.
You’re correct. Since I called you on it a couple weeks ago you’ve been much better about it. I apologize for the exaggeration.
Well, video clerk/artist doesen’t sound like that uncommon a career package 
D&R
No, it’s not. I went to college for a BFA, in (changing majors three times) illustration, photography, and finally performance. After school I mostly wrote, then I mostly did music, then mostly “biological art” (aquaria, terraria, ponds, gardens) and nowadays my art is mostly in fibers, though I devote at least as much of my “artistic” energy to food. Not a bluechip career track; unless you have the ambition and the discipline (and, let’s face it, luck) to make a gallery career happen, then yeah, I’m one of those “failed” artists you find working in bookstores and videostores in a city near you. If that makes me, in [generic you] your eyes, a loser, I’m cool with that; we [still generic] obviously have different values. I find I’m happier (relative term, that) dabbling deeply in whatever new subject or medium catches my interests, learning as much as I can about it, and then getting distracted by the next one. I don’t have a pool and a Beemer, but for whatever reason that’s the way my creative energies have always gone. Dunno why I offered this here. But there it is.
But still giving rein to your bass instincts, for which you should be strung up.
Oh go fiddle with yourself.
I understand that a lot of people label it as “name-dropping” and consider that to be a negative thing. You find it " pathetic" and “obnoxious.” I take you at your word and I have no criticism of your attitude. But I don’t understand it.
I could understand being offended by pretentiousness, but you and I don’t seem to have any disagreement about lissener’s credibility. But the actual act of talking about famous people that he has met or known is annoyinng to some people and entertaining to others.
There have been threads that how inquired about our personal contacts with well-known people – so I know I’m not the only one interested in this sort of thing. Some of my friends are retired flight attendants and their tails of who was kind and who was difficult are fascinating.
No criticism intended of you. I just still find it puzzling that preferences can be so different.
I understand that a lot of people label it as “name-dropping” and consider that to be a negative thing. You find it " pathetic" and “obnoxious.” I take you at your word and I have no criticism of your attitude. But I don’t understand it.
I could understand being offended by pretentiousness, but you and I don’t seem to have any disagreement about lissener’s credibility. But the actual act of talking about famous people that he has met or known is annoyinng to some people and entertaining to others.
There have been threads that how inquired about our personal contacts with well-known people – so I know I’m not the only one interested in this sort of thing. Some of my friends are retired flight attendants and their tails of who was kind and who was difficult are fascinating.
No criticism intended of you. I just still find it puzzling that preferences can be so different.
You were right only about one small point that did not match your original point in the GQ thread.
Unlike this thread, you were justifiably pitted for that. Colibri is perhaps too tired to go back through it, and Excalibre is certainly too banned, but I’d be willing to summarize your many language-related mistakes. I have made some small contribution to language threads since that time, and in fact I was spurred to step up for the sake of linguistics because of the vacuum left by Excalibre’s departure. Added bonus: I’m slightly nicer than him, too.
That was the only point I was trying to make, despite how wildly reinterpreted it became. Excalibre and Colibri and everyone else involved in that read into my single technical point a bizarre array of generalizations that I did mean to suggest in any shape or form; only the technical point backed up by my cites. For somehow people were too busy trying to prove that I was wrong rather than trying to understand what I was saying. There was no attempt at discussion or understanding; only the most bizarrely vitriolic attack I’ve ever seen here. It still utterly bewilders me, when the facts that I backed up with cites were so simple. I’ll never understand it. Since that thread, I’ve had about a dozen friends read both threads in question, and not one of them has been able to give me a clue why my cites were ignored, and why I was so viciously attacked simply for cutting and pasting from Wiki and several corroborating sources. Even if it remained open to debate, no one was interested in debate; only in attack.
If you don’t understand, I’ll try to help you because I don’t understand how you can’t understand. I’m going to list a lot of mistakes on your part, but I’m doing this without rancor.
“Reinterpreted” is too generous a word. You fucked up your original explanation, as you even admitted later. And it wasn’t a mild mistake. You compounded several false statements into very little space.
“Spanish” as an adjective can indeed refer to “languages spoken in Spain”. But “Spanish” the noun refers to only one language, and you don’t make that distinction clear. You were aware of it, sure, but the way you phrased it made it an easy inference that you didn’t know what you were talking about. Not a mistake, exactly, but still not helpful. But you still did mess something up:
Mistake 1: Castilian is not “technically” the official language of Spain. This was an error on your part.
Now let me be clear: Castilian certainly is one possible translation of the Spanish word in the constitution. Another possible translation is “Spanish”. But Castilian is not somehow more correct in some obscure “technical” sense. Castilian’s obviously got some mojo going for it, since it’s the hyper-literal choice, and you did demonstrate later that Castilian was in fact chosen by some translators as the preferred method of translating that word. Still, there is nothing “technically” better about it. That’s simply not a true statement. When you clarify later in the Pit thread, you change the meaning. What you say later is true, but it’s not what you said originally.
Mistake 2: Your analogy with “British” doesn’t work. British is not a noun referring to a language. In this context, it can only be an adjective. “Spanish”, however, can function as both, and when the topic is languages, people are going to be using the noun. And so your analogy is entirely unhelpful and uncommunicative, not to mention wrong.
These sorts of errors continue in the next post:
Mistake 3: Spanish, in the case of that thread, was not referring as an adjective to the “languages spoken in the state of Spain”. People were using the unambiguous noun. Nava started it by listing four nouns, four languages.
Mistake 4: The world is not being “less precise” in any sense whatsoever when it refers to [The Language at Issue] as Spanish. Spanish is, in fact, the less ambiguous and therefore more precise choice. It is not the only choice (after all, some people do choose to translate the word in the constitution as “Castilian”), but it is the choice that English speakers will immediately know and recognize. This is what “precision” actually entails.
Mistake 5: Spanish is not just the “political” term. It is the linguistic term. Linguists would not, in fact, use “Castilian” unless they were making an obscure semantic point.
Mistake 6: It is not too general a term to refer to any one language, since as a noun it refers to exactly one language. More evidence that it’s not “too general” can be found in the fact that 99.9% of the references to the signified [The Language at Issue] use the signifier “Spanish”. If it were too general, it would not be in such overwhelming favor.
Well, this is technically true. But it’s also technically true that the language that we all know as “Spanish” is Spanish. In fact, it’s much better known as Spanish, which makes Spanish the more precise term. You stay on the side of correctness on this one, but in an almost completely useless way.
I could continue this for a long, long time, but for now, there’s only one more error I want to point out, because it is the heart of the issue. You say in this thread that you were only trying to make one point, and I think it’s this, a slightly rephrased version of what you said originally:
But this is still incorrect. The official (i.e. constitutional) name of the language that most people think of as “Spanish” is, in fact, Castellano.
It is not, as you claim, “Castilian”. “Castilian” is a translation of that word. It is one possible translation. It is not the only possible translation. A second possible translation of the word Castellano in this context is “Spanish”. There is nothing inherently better or more technically correct about using the hyper-literal translation. Some people choose to translate the word this way. They’re free to do so. But that doesn’t mean that the technical, official name of the language is “Castilian”. Castilian will do. It functions. But it’s not transcendenttally better or more precise.
To try to be balanced, I think this is an error on Colibri’s part when he pitted you:
I think you pretty well demonstrated that both translations are correct.
But you did not in any way demonstrate that “Castilian” is technically better, because that’s not true. And Colibri would no doubt stand by his opinion that “Spanish” is the better translation. Given his experience with the language, I would trust him on that.
I’m not sure how the tone of this post reads, but I want to reiterate that I’m not doing this for some nefarious purpose. I’m not trying to pick on you. The simple fact is that you were much, much more wrong than you were right. This meant that the thing you were right about was not worth defending. It was not worth even entering the GQ thread in the first place. I mean, sure, it’s interesting that the word in the constitution is Castellano. And it’s also kind of interesting to know that some people translate that as “Castilian”.
But you still shouldn’t have jumped in to say that “Castilian” is a better translation. More than that, you shouldn’t have corrected a native speaker. More than that, you shouldn’t have defended your point (no matter how valid it was in its limited sense) because you didn’t have the precise vocabulary to explain it properly. You made an extensive series of errors on a topic they are well familiar with, and it’s no wonder that they got upset with you. They were justified in doing so.
Now, I think Colibri’s comments on your being “delusional” are ridiculous, but I can absolutely see where that’s coming from. To put it mildly, you did not act well in those threads.
Which, again, is all I was doing.
The rest of your post is interesting, and I wish the original discussion had taken place in GD or GQ, so these kinds of details could’ve been discussed like grownups, instead of Colibri’s bizarrely personal reaction, which I will never ever understand (and I’m delusional :rolleyes: ).
Balancing your detailed post with the cites that I linked to previously convinces me further that, while it’s obviously worthy of an interesting debate, there is no sense in which Colibri was right to label my heavily supported, hardly unique, opinion on the debate as flat out “wrong,” let alone worthy of a vitriolic pitting.
I revisited the cites that I had provided before, and to take that concrete, black-and-white position of your post above is to say that all of those cites, too, are wrong. Even though the majority of the references I was able to find agreed with them. Surely you can’t simply dismiss that. The limited context in which I brought up the alternate translation is narrowly esoteric enough that I will still believe the majority of references I was able to find–impartial, academic sources–rather than the colloquial knowledge of everyday spoken Spanish (which is irrelevant in this narrow context) which is the only “proof” that’s been offered that I was “wrong.” I ventured an opinion on a subject that is open to interpretation, and I backed it up with research. This in no way makes me “wrong.” If Colibri had acknowledged that there was room for debate, if he had even acknowledged my cites, and responded to them specifically–let alone the fact that the majority of resources I found agreed with them–instead of having a bizarre temper tantrum, this could’ve been an interesting discussion. Anyway I’m repeating myself; time to go to bed. Thanks for your reasoned response. I’d still like to see you specifically refute my cites, but I’ll certainly live without that.
Well, I personally do think it was worth a vitriolic pitting two years ago. But people change. You’ve proven that yourself. You’ve stayed within the lines even after a suspension/banning when other posters could not. This is a rare quality. This very fact is why I’m trying to explain this to the best of my understanding. If I’m eloquent enough to get this across (and I’m not sure about that, but maybe I am), then I know you’ll give it due consideration.
They are wrong if they argue against any of the points I made above. That sounds a bit snotty, maybe, but the principles I was trying to outline are pretty basic. They’re not controversial among experts.
This isn’t unusual, by the way. There are a lot of misconceptions about language in the world. Biology is the hard science, so it gets most of the attention. This is right and proper, and I have no problem with that. But in my humble opinion, linguistics is far more misunderstood. This isn’t your cites’ fault. It’s just the way things are.
But you cited too many things for me to go through one by one. This is not just because the material in the cites is extensive–it’s also because I’m not sure how you are personally interpreting the information. Maybe the cite says something that I didn’t catch on the first read. Maybe the cite says something that is different from what you were claiming. I can’t know any of this unless it’s all revisited. If you can go through them at, say, three at a time, I can lay out my case.
But this factual stuff, which I’m more than happy to go through, is not the only issue. I don’t know any “nice” way to say this, and of course this is just my opinion, but you really do seem to have more problems with tone than any other poster I’ve come across. You seem to have problems 1) understanding how your words are likely to be interpreted, and 2) perceiving the intended tone from other peoples’ posts. This problem is compounded by the slopeheaded knuckledraggers whose idea of a good time is revisiting their fondly remembered middle-school insults. They’re willing to take offense even when it’s ridiculous (e.g. this very OP), and they’re more than willing to insult you without cause. Most posters don’t have to put up with shit like this. I know I sure as hell don’t, and I don’t know how I’d respond to such idiotic taunting if I had to endure it as often as you.
But even if it’s unfair, you’re still going get called on it if you lash out just one time against the wrong person. Them’s the breaks. If you want to erase a past reputation, you can’t just be better than you were–you have to be unimpeachable.
If you’re willing, I’d say the Pit is a fine spot to go through the old cites. There will be random potshots at you, guaranteed. But those people will be a bunch of worthless fuckers, and not worth responding to.
And though I’m much more qualified to explain hard linguistic facts than to discuss something as amorphous as “tone” , I’d be willing to have a conversation about that, too. For example, I almost spoke up in mild irritation at your David Foster Wallace contribution. Not because I thought it was irrelevant (his assholishness could be considered fair game), but because you put forth the assertion without any anecdotes or supporting information. It was just your word, and nothing more, which quite understandably affects how people perceive the intention behind your words. Maybe that wouldn’t have been improved by an anecdote (we’re not all Sampiro, after all), but maybe it could be worth investigation.
There’s no reason that such a stupid fucking OP can’t lead to better things.