Category: Education

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Well, American Spectator “Snuck” (#gagamaggot) in Another Moronic Headline

Ukrainian Leadership Claims Drone Sunk [sic] Two Russian Patrol Vessels

The headline is more telling than the actual article. If a Ukranian drone SANK a couple of Russian patrol vessels, good, but that R. Emmett Tyrell is willing to put his name on a mag that so grossly abuses the English language in a headline says pretty disgusting things about R. Emmett Tyrell’s lack of literacy, and poor literacy inevitably leads to sub-par communication of ideas (something I have had against American Spectator for some time, now, anyway).

Note: the PRETERITE (A.K.A., simple past tense) of “sink” is in no way, shape, fashion, or form “sunk.” “Sunk” is for perfect tenses (had/have sunk). Any headline writer that keeps his job after stupidly, illiterately, writing the headline proffered here does so only because editorial eyes are also pseudoliterate or just stupid.

OK, OK, maybe the problem is just that American Spectator is staffed with editors and headline writers who pattern themseves after lobotomized Bonobo Chimpanzees or Cooter from Gunsmoke.

American Spectator: promoting the destruction of literacy one headline at a time?

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Reason #5,689

“Snuck” is an example of one of the MANY reasons I have such a deep distrust of democracy.

That is all. For now.

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Classes of Writers

There are two main classes of writers that can — broadly — be discerned by this bright line divider:

1. Those who know how to use and appropriately do use m-dashes.
2. Pseudoliterate imposters (whose “work” is usually edited by lobotomized Bonobo Chimpanzees).

Oh, there are many other indicators, but that one will generally do the trick.

YW.

🙂

There may be those among my (2?) readers who question which class I belong in based on my own use of an m-dash above. If so, nanny-nanny-boo-boo to you. *heh*

BTW, I read the occassional pseudoliterate imposter for the dubious pleasure of making snarky comments in notes, then reposting those notes in a Amazon review. Yeh, it’s kinda mean, but they EARNED it. One such pseudoliterate imposter I read recently described a wedding (it was in an “action hero” sort of seventh grade boys’ fantasy). My impression of the “classy” (so asserted by pseudoliterate imposter) wedding was of a kinda trashy “trailer park” wedding. (And yes, I know some perfectly nice folks also live in trailer parks, but I’m invoking the “TPTrash” meme for shorthand, here.) It was a hoot trashing that, since it had already trashed itself.

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More Contemporary Fiction Foibles

I tend to “file 13” books I pick up whose central character is openly described as “brilliant” and yet who consistently does execrably stupid things all within its realm of assigned “smartitudinousness” (is there a useful real world term for assumed but non-existent inteligence, or may I just use my snarky neologism?).

#gagamaggot

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It’s Still “The Little Things”

N.B., as you may note, I like to ignore the rule about writing short, concise sentences, because if a reader cannot parse clear text unless a sentence is short enough for the attention span of a gnat, I do not much care whether they read on. There are some things I like about getting to be a Curmudgeonly Olde Pharte. *heh*

Oh, I have come to expect them, but “Dunning-Krugerands” who are willfully stuck on stupid abound in all realms of publication, nowadays–self-pub, trad-pub, online and “dead tree” magazines and newspapers, etc.–and I still just cannot get used to seeing words in print grossly misused, mind-boggling displays of subject-object confusion, amphibolous construction that renders a text as meaningless gibberish, baffling syntax, the use (abuse) of punctuation as random text-confetti, and evidence of willful disregard for doing one’s homework to support even a thin veil of suspension of disbelief when writing fiction (some scholarly, peer-reviewed “scientific” papers do a better job of supporting suspension of disbelief for their fiction than do many novels nowadays. . . )

For example, except for the rare equestrian fiction by an actual “horse person,” almost every piece of fiction I’ve read in the last decade or more that features horses and riders–westerns, fantasy, mysteries: all of ’em–have gotten nearly everything horse related wrong. And most of the wrong depictions have one thng in common: they hew very closely to popular, mostly “Hollyweird,” depictions of horses and riders, and they almost always simply treat horses as a low-tech, inconvenient substitute for cars and ‘bikes. (And I have yet to read any contemporary writer of a popular genre who treats horse manure with the respect it deserves. *heh*)

But, of course, that sort of “I already know evrything there is to know anout everything” attitude carries across to every bit of a “Dunning-Krugerand’s” writing (and speech, which is why subliterate morons get paid the big bucks to be TV taking heads).

Sometimes, given the proliferation of media influence, the only way to go through a day w/o killing brain cells by listening to Stupid Speech™ or Stupid Writing™ is to turtle up and avoid reading, talking with (or even just peripherally hearing) others at all.

The hermit lifestyle is looking more and more appealing. . .

Seriously: if someone does not even know the difference betweem “come here” and “sic ’em” (go-come, take-bring, etc.) then that person should 1. Shut up/stop writing and 2. Give their best shot at passing a basic English as a Second Language course (their first language being Advanced Stupidity).

OK, that’s enough of me being positive and uplifting. You’re welcome. 😉

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Unless One Is Constructing a Half-witty Insult. . .

. . . “not a wit” is. . . witless. “Not a whit” = “not a bit; not an iota; not the smallest part,” etc. “Not a wit” simply indicates someone without wit, a dullard, a dummy, a subliterate “Dunning-Krugerand” wannabe self-pub writer. *heh*

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A Day Without Learning. . .

. . .is a day wasted.

Kinda late in the day already to be learning something new (to me), but after a few search-fu moves of great artistry, I now know enough about the lost city of Tolente to be, well, not dangerous, exactly, but annoying.

There’s your search prompt. Do with it what you will. Or won’t. 🙂

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A Different “Tact”

Yeh, I’m not going to be tactful here. People who make homophonic mistakes in writing are illiterate. I DGARA whether some “edumacationist” somewhere may call them “functionally literate.” “Edumacationists” are a disease and should be erradicated.

Misused words in writing due to homophonic conflation is simply due to poor literacy. Period. Using sounds or letter combinations that aren’t even words, due to mishearing (and never, apparently, READING) words is an even surer sign, if that’s possible. FarceBook is a particularly “rich” source of both of these sorts of homophonic errors. Most recent (as in, just a couple of minutes ago) example: “intack” (not EVEN a word) for “intact.”

Oh, the post title? I cannot (well, will not) even try to count the number of times I have typed (or thought) “gagamaggot” when I read or heard, “. . .taking a different tact” when “tack” expresses the meaning and “tact” does not.

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“Edumacationism” vs. Education

“Gummint” schools are largely “prisons for kids,” but there can be bright spots. . .

Of all the classes I had in high school, two “classes” have proven to be the most _personably_ valuable, long term, and both for similar reasons. I was lost in my first year of algebra, thanks largely to a disaffection stemming from ghastly experiences with ‘new math.” (Before exposure to that abomination of “edumacationist” experimentation, I kinda enjoyed math.) Thankfully, a sophomore year teacher who just loved math and teaching it resurrected a dead enjoyment of math.

And then there was band. I learned more appreciation of music from simply rehearsing and playing the works we were exposed to than in all my college classes combined. I can still hear many of those pieces “between my ears.”

And the math classes and music worked well together in forming logic chains in my head, and those served me well in appreciating and seeing links in language, history, and many other fields. Of course, the fact that I simply ignored classes when they became boring and substituted voracious reading also helped forge those “chains of reason.”

So, “gummint” schools were not a total waste of time. . . as long as I managed to ignore the boring parts. (Example: teachers who taught “from the book” when I had already read through the textbook before the first week passed. Boring.)