Words Words Everywhere and Not a Thing to Read Date Monday, April 15, 2024 - 10:38 PM PST Topic Rant It is my great joy and my terrible misfortune to be adequately educated in my mother tongue and to enjoy the written word. The ambivalence that I experience when I approach the Internet is therefore, at times, quite severe. I have an ordered mind, logical and methodical as a rule, and I do not enjoy the chaotic, unordered and inefficient language employed by other native English speakers, or in this case writers, but like a train wreck, I do slow down to view the carnage. If we define language as the symbols that a human mind uses to relate, understand, and communicate the stimuli that it perceives and the emotions that it feels, then the logical assumption is that the Internet is being overrun with monkey. These monkeys with keyboards, in conjunction with a supercomputer to read the resulting scripts there by produced, are producing the majority personal web pages, 30% of corporate web sites, and the vast majority of consumer sites. No rational, cogent human would use a phrase like " I am a combination of a few beers (although I cut my drinking down anywhere to drinking from 1-4 times a month), and lifting a few weights." to mean that he has recently lost some weight due to cutting back on his drinking and getting more exercise. Do I need to elaborate? In majority, my job is to correct these little lapses, to add some order to the disorder of language, in short to be a grammar nazi. I delight in my job. It is entertaining, enriching, and offers many opportunities to expand my horizons. But then, for the most part, I edit scholarly works; text books, educational websites, research documentation, and the occasional fiction book. In the course of my mental labors, I turn to the Internet for reference material frequently. When I need to find the exact date of the end of the 100 years war, when I need the exact spelling of Freud's wife's family name, when some article or other is referenced from some magazine or journal, when I need that name of the captain of the first ship on which Darwin traveled I turn to the Internet. As I spend so much time looking for such pages, I invariably find all sorts of other pages on the way. I amuse myself while the tortoise like pages of academia load by reading whatever other page may catch my eye, or as is more often the case, to pick between the worse excesses that catch my attention. I quantify these pages into categories like "insane monkey", "rabid, snail-brained mouth breather", and "should have their computer confiscated immediately and with extreme prejudice". I am an avid reader, truly avid. I read, on average over the last 20 years, four books a week, some thousand pages of fiction and often a thousand of non-fiction as well. My job is also to read and I consume nearly an entire textbook a week, including the majority of articles and books (in synopsis or abstract form) as well. Add to that my frequent and copious visits to Shmeng, my own site, and correspondence to my family, friends, business associates, and clients, and you have a day replete in the written word. I am also a published writer, having produced both fiction and non-fiction, and have been quoted in newspapers and journals. I write rants at Shmeng and my own site, I write reviews of texts and educational sites, business proposals, and grant applications. I write research papers for my own sociological research as well, but that is, as yet, unpublished. These are my credentials for critique of others. Literature, like other art forms, requires study to appreciate it's splendor and it nuances to its fullest, and like other arts, it can be distained by even the least educated dullard. Our education system do not teach the appreciation of this art any more than they teach the love of any other art, barring perhaps the art of war. This is, to me, indicative of the decay in both our empire and our social system. This may not strike some of you as shmeng, but I assure you that, to me, it is very shmengy. To be assaulted by badly written, inarticulate, hatemongering or febrile, insensate 'views' is almost intolerable on the best of days. On my less forgiving days, I copy the text from these personal sites, correct it, and send it to the author with my condolences and a plea to attend an English class at their local college. The few members that have met me face to face or with whom I have had long online correspondences, will, I am sure be able to confirm that not only do I write copiously, albeit that that the words are infested with amusing typos, but that I am often stenatorial in manner and tone; that in fact, I am didactive and long winded. This ignorance bothers me as much as mall rats bother bettie_x, drama bothers Devin, or agnostics bother Bible thumpers. I am frustrated that schools refuse to teach the one most important life skill, that parents are hindered by their illiteracy and thereby restrict their progeny with their example, and that the well-written word is shunned in business. And like bettie_x, Devin, and the Bible thumpers, I am dependant on it for my amusement and paycheck. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=407