. . .for a “Free! Save $12.95!” book. You tell me:
“This is a story about loss, overcoming adversity, and the triumph of the human spirit. . . “
Right. Nuh-uh. Not reading a thinly-disguised (or not at all disguised) touchy-feely crap. Clicking on by. . .
*meh* I purchased another 18 books this last week that ALL looked like much better bets than the one described by the blurb that began with the above off-putting remark. *heh* Three “new” purchases were from the book cart at the local library, picked up today when I returned the ones I checked out last Saturday. Between all the books in my own library, “discoveries” (mostly its new acquisitions) at the local public library and ebooks, I have quite enough books lined up to read without messing about with someone trying too hard and going all “emo” in my eyeballs.
I’ve developed a bit of a backlog lately too.
“going all “emo” in my eyeballs.” — sounds like an unpleasant bodily fluids release.
I’ve noticed too that you’ve been having a conversation lately with someone who appears to want to spread deliberate aliteracy. Good luck with that.
Perri, it’s not much of a conversation when one side is nonsense. And while aliteracy might be applicable, I begin to think that the person you refer to is woefully subliterate. I might in some contexts use “illiterate” in the sense that my grandmother and great aunts who were teachers around the turn of the 20th century thought of the term (very poorly-read). “Illiterate” nowadays has been pejorated to mean something like “completely, totally and absolutely unable to puzzle out those weird hieroglyphs hoity-toity folks pretend to write/read” while “literate” has come to mean, “able to laboriously puzzle out those weird hieroglyphs hoity-toity folks pretend to write/read without comprehending what the words actually mean.”
In days of yore, “illiterate” could indeed mean something similar to be completely, totally and absolutely unable to puzzle out the written word but could also carry the meaning of being so very poorly-read that the written word had very little, if any, meaning to convey to the illiterate.
Of course, that’s why I typically use a literate–aliterate (or a-literate, for those who have trouble differentiating between “aliterate” and “alliterate”)–subliterate–illiterate spectrum nowadays.
(And this from someone–me, of course–who doesn’t view himself as particularly well-read compared to his own grandparents.)