"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
Rep Stockman requests subpoena of NSA’s White House, IRS phone logs
“Obama assures the public he only collected this information to uncover wrongdoing and protect civil liberties. Clearly he would want us to use it to investigate this case, because otherwise he’d be lying,” said Stockman.
“If Obama has nothing to hide he has nothing to fear,” said Stockman.
About time at least one Republican located a workable testosterone therapy.
“Journalism”–offering employment opportunities to the subliterate.
In addition to the obvious reason, this Foxnews article chaps my buns because the author (and editor?) got paid for spouting this kind of gibberish:
Will someone please buy a copy of “English for Dummies” for the author of that monstrosity? (In case the site changes it w/o a transparent acknowledgement of the error(s), I’ll just post a screencap, hmm? CLICK to embiggen)
Would someone like to diagram that sentence for me?
I have no reason for this post, except that I find the word “onomatopoeia” to be intrinsically ironic.
Just re-sampled (not really re-reading it, just skimming a bit and recalling having read it as a lad) a classic Andre Norton and ran across,
“Nick could not tell whether it was singing or music. . . “
*groan* See Inigo Montoya. I do not think those words mean what she thinks they mean. Not all music is singing, but all singing (though not all that is called singing, especially nowadays) is music.*sigh*
I don’t see many SPAM comments, never have, thanks to Askimet, so such things really stand out when they show up in a comment approval queue. Most recent? A comment complimenting my perspicacity that appeared on a page about THE correct way to load a roll of toilet paper that also contained commentary on efficient and “proper” use of same.
(It’s the voices in my head. Really.)
. . .let me count the ways. 😉
Of course, one very big reason I appreciate eBooks is storage. With thousands of volumes of hardcopy books clogging our home, storing electronic copies of text is a BIG advantage for us. Sure, I miss the tactile sensations of reading hardcopy when reading eBooks, but the text’s the thing, you know.
Then there’s the thing with aging eyes. With eBooks, I can select from a wide range of text sizes and even, in some formats, toggle between serif and non-serif fonts to ease my eyes. Very nice.
Portability is a big plus, too. When I go out with my Kindle Fire, I carry several hundred eBooks with me, some of them as yet unread and others re-readable. Very nice!
Oh, there are other reasons I like eBooks (less expensive, overall, than hardcopy, easier to shop for, immediate lookup of etymologies, historical references, artwork, etc.) but The Big Reason I really appreciate eBooks hails back to a habit I’ve had for years, one that has grown ever more “necessary” for me to engage in as time has gone on, and a habit that is a real no-no to give expression when reading library books: I edit my books to be more as they would have been had the writers had literate editors in the publication loop. *heh* Marking up books–lining through a “dele” (from “deleatur”–editorial deletions), correcting a spelling, grammar or word usage error, cleaning up an awkward descriptive narrative here, an amphibolous phrase there and the odd “WTF?!?” in between are all serious “Bad Dog”s *heh* when applied to library books. My own copies? Full of such things.
And then there are the other notes, usually underlined or starred and noted by page number on the end pages of books, adding background or commentary correcting language or historical problems or simply reminders to look further into something mentioned in th text. And example from a recent read is where a character–a Roman Catholic priest, no less!–translated “Sic transit gloria mundi” as “the glory of man is fleeting”. *feh* Any even semi-literate person knows better. “Sic transit gloria mundi” is more properly, “Thus passes the glory of the world,” or more casually, “the world’s glory is fleeting, transient, impermanent.” No reference to man in the phrase at all, except that man is a part of temporal existence.
Things like that irritate me, so correcting them scratches an itch.
[The observant reader of this blog might at this point–or perhaps at an even earlier point *heh*–say, “Yeh, if you’re so smart, why is your blog filled with all kinds of convoluted constructions, obscurantist phraseology, and even the occasional misspelled word and lousy grammatical construction?” Fair question. This blog is written as dialog, spoken word, and I cut myself slack here as much as I do authors when they are writing dialog. *shrugs* And who says I have to be consistent anyway? *heh*Nevertheless, I cut myself no slack and am abashed when I re-read an old post and find a misused word or obvious grammar error that cannot be legitimately placed at the feet of casual speech.]
I like the annotation features offered in my Kindle Fire for making snarky corrections to text. In fact, since the silly onscreen keyboard is a bit irksome to use, the very fact that it slows down my reading is often a plus (I do tend to read things too quickly.). But for annotations, nothing beats reading an eBook in html format in a browser on a plain ole everyday computer. Open the html-formatted book in the browser, open each chapter in a text editor and switch back and forth between them for inserting comments, corrections and amendments in the text: fun for me.
Note: my notations do include interesting tidbits to explore further, as I said above, and also amusing lil things, like a character with only one eye appearing described as looking on a dangerous ally, “The big one. . . seemed ambivalent but kept a real close eye on her.” *heh* “Eye”. Funny.
More. . .
One small distraction when inserting notes into eBooks formatted as html files is the really, really sloppy html I see a lot of. *sigh* It’s almost as though many of them were formatted in a WYSIWYG editor like FrontPage that inserts all sorts of extraneous, useless, completely unnecessary crap. Oh, I don’t mind deprecated html tags that’ve been replaced with more “acceptable” markup lingo so much, but so much of the garbage markup is simply unnecessary.
(Enemy action. But of course, efforts to destroy useful distinctions in English are myriad. . . )
Just curious. Anyone know why some folks apparently want to destroy a perfectly good adjective AND a perfectly useful and clear adverb/noun combo by using the adjectives, “backseat” and “backyard” in place of the clearer and more useful “back seat” and “back yard”? (Note: anyone literate and fluent in English both knows the difference and pronounces the adjectives and adjective/noun phrases differently.)
Of course, these are but two of many examples of the attempted extirpation of useful distinctions by subliterate morons (all too often) writing for the Hivemind, their supposedly literate editors and publishers, and those weak minds under the Hivemind’s influence.
Is this sort of thing yet another example of “enemy action” against literacy and simple good sense?
“As for the protest, I liked it.” Yes, we can see that.
(Although I blurred out the hint of what Putin was giving a thumbs up to, I understand the words written in Cyrillic on the woman’s back might be NSFW.)
Not sayin’ the title, but really?
. . . there’s enough (plural noun)s on the. . .
Linguistically innumerate. *gagamaggot* And,
“Ah.” He smiled, and even drunk as he was it was the kind of knowing, sarcastic smile that set my teeth on edge. “Jealousy.”
OK, I’ve not necessarily given enough context for the second, but people who use “jealousy” when they mean “envy” really set my teeth on edge. There’s a clear and useful distinction between the two that poorly-read folks seem all to have missed, and now subliterates are forcing their destruction of a useful distinction out of English. I just hate that.
So, as much as I’ve enjoyed the rest of the book to this point, if this sort of thing continues, I may end up putting this one down just because of the annoyance factor.
. . .the author of this awkward line,
“. . .the lovely scars he had from the one leg being severely fractured to the point of bone poking through the skin after. . .”
. . .could have saved a whole lotta words with “compound fracture“. But because he can no longer count on his readership being much more literate than the typical eighth-grader nowadays, he had to go all around the barn to use something like ten words (no, I’ve not actually counted) to say what a literate* person could vividly grasp in two.
No, I am not using “literate” in its least form here. I use it in the sense of,
“1 a : educated, cultured. . . 2 a : versed in literature. . . 2c : having knowledge or competence. . . “
And NONE of those apply to someone who cannot read “compound fracture” and either understand the term at once OR have both the intellectual curiosity and competence to either winkle the meaning on their own from context (not necessarily easy to do in this case) or LOOK IT UP! (N.B. When I was a kid, we had a monstrously huge two-volume dictionary–which I still have–that spent most of its time near or under the head of my bed, because I not only looked up EVERY word or term I did not immediately understand from context or simply learned new words and terms from reading the thing for pleasure. And I still do not consider myself as literate as either of my grandfathers were.)
More and more folks today have vocabularies limited by what they HEAR via the Hivemind, and more and more folks today do not even understand the words they hear from that propaganda machine. And so otherwise moderately literate authors HAVE to dumb down their text. (The one who cobbled up the abortion I cited above does still have ALL his characters use “there’s” with plural objects. *sigh* It’s. . . “interesting”–in a gagamaggot kind of way–to hear characters with multiple doctorates in the sciences who are linguistically innumerate. *profound sigh*)