The going theory is that Matt is a member of Generation Spellcheck. Smart, good writer, wholly incapable of distinguishing homonyms. But this is evidence of deeper rot.
My father, in his late 60s and terribly erudite, spells like Yglesias. I treasure a letter he wrote me once in which, trying to quote Henry V, he came up with "'Once more into the britch!'" He has also come up with such gems as "maby" for "maybe." Not trying to be funny, just missing whatever mental ability involves being able to spell.
That said, not that I judge him for it, but Yglesias should find someone less brain-damaged in this regard to proofread for him. I understand that he's got a roommate with a lot of spare time these days...
Spellcheck should have caught 'assymetric'.
Assy-metric warfare raises its own interesting possibilities, though. The side with the biggest asses wins in assymetric warfare. It sounds silly, but, as it involves no blood shed, is actually a more highly evolved method of handling disputes than our much touted "wars."
LB: The problem being that I share a Labsian delight in the tenets of assymetric warfare. C'mon, this post?
My theory is that Ygesias, if not purposefully misspells, purposefully neglects to check for spelling, in order to show that he is above such pedestrian concerns. He is, in effect, declaring to blogdom that he is damn good, it doesn't matter if he misspells things; you will read him anyway. It entails a minor degree of disdain for his readership, just enough to make you like him for it.
Like shooting free-throws with your off-hand, or any number of deliberately non-chalant behaviors.
He's trying to bond with the masses. He's a natural for Florida politics, representing two of their main demographics.
The side with the biggest asses wins in assymetric warfare.
And thus did the mighty Hottentot Empire assume control of the global economic order.
non-chalant behaviors
So who shows chalant behavior?
So who shows chalant behavior?
I was going to say pyromaniacs, thinking it was related to the French chaleur. But it doesn't seem related to hotness.
I just can't spell, okay. It doesn't make me a bad person.
"Smarter than me, but prey for pedants nonetheless:" Was this bad syntax on purpose? All that Latin has made me terribly sensitive to incorrect case. "Smarter than I" is what you meant, ogged, right?
Are you just trying to slum it with the misspelling Yglesias?
Bostoniangirl - Your mockery should be directed at Labs, not Ogged.
I've never understood the rule on verb tense re implied cocks. Where's w-lfs-n when you need him.
This isn't so much about you, personally, MY, as it is about you as an exception to a rule, or prejudice, that sees good spelling and intelligence as linked. You're smart, but a horrible speller, so you've become an object of wonder and curiosity. Instead of reacting with dismay that people seem upset about your bad spelling, you should be thinking, "wow, I must be really smart to have these people so worked up about my spelling."
That said, I agree with Kieran that this particular misspelling is clearly not just about your inability to spell.
Apologies to ogged.
Labs, here's how it ought to read:
"[Yglesias is] smarter than I [am], but [he is] prey for pedants nonetheless [because my cock is bigger than his]"
And hear eye thought that, unlike sum other blogs, unfogged usually refrained from attacking people ad homonym.
"ad homonym" is perfect, eb. It works on both levels.
I probably shouldn't betray the man's confidence, but I have observed Yglesias posting with his eyes closed. Says it's too easy otherwise.
Really, though, he can spell and does know the fundamentals of grammar. Maybe he just isn't able to do all those things and type at the same time.
For what it's worth, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a poor speller too.
And while I may be a better speller than, er, they are, I'd consider selling a kidney to be able to write like either of them.
Smarter than me is perfectly acceptable. Dumber than me isn't.
I share a Labsian delight
I just read this as "Lesbian delight". Freudian slip or Freudian trap?
People get uptight about other people criticizing them for bad spelling and then they advance some pseudo-theory about thinking in concepts rather than images, or the simpler and pointless "it's the thought that counts." But languages have particular orthographies for a reason -- so that we can read and understand what the words actually mean, whether conceptually or imagerifiedly (I just cleverly made that up, and I'm sticking with its spelling).
But the basic thing is this -- bad spelling, especially in one's native language (and not just typos), means you're a poor reader or sometimes just an idiot. I still can't read the posters on Kos for that reason. You can't even be smarter necessarily, as Fontana suggests, if you're a bad speller. Just lazy or stooopid or missed Sesame Street and refrigerator magnets in childhood.
Bad spelling is a good sign of someone who talks and writes a lot, but doesn't listen or read much. One can be natively smart apart from these qualities, but native intelligence only manifests itself through reading and listening, and then writing and talking. Too many people, a lot of bloglanders included, talk out their solipsistic asses.
Besides this, who cares about what Yglesias says anyway? Anyone have a reason I should care, apart from this spelling issue? Has he ever said anything that rattled your world, taught you something really new, radically altered your perspective on an issue for the better, educated you? Nothing I've seen has come close to that. So, why's he doing this when he can't even spell whatever it is he's doing?
Tom, you've had that comment queued up for years, and this was your chance to post it somewhere, wasn't it?
[Having written it, I've decided the rest of this comment wasn't worth the effort.]
Actually, no one advanced either of the pseudo-theories you expected. And the rest of your comment, other than the swipe at Matt, who writes great stuff with alarming regularity, depends entirely on this unsupported assertion: "bad spelling, especially in one's native language (and not just typos), means you're a poor reader or sometimes just an idiot."
Unless you're defining "poor reader" as "someone who doesn't learn to spell well from reading," I can't imagine how your claim is true. Right up there at comment #2, LB tells us that her erudite father can't spell. I guess you deny his erudition. And we all know, from reading him, that Matt reads, remembers what he's read, and applies the arguments and information to what he's writing. He also pays enough attention to what he reads to correct misperceptions by other readers.
Ogged,
Sure, queued up for years -- post-it notes all over my desk waiting for this moment. More like this: came across this site by hazard and tossed off a comment before heading off to bed, which is now briefly delayed.
Sorry to offend LB's dad, if offense was taken. That wasn't intended on my part. You, ogged, set that up. And I regret that you misread it such that I'm in the position of apologizing to LB in order to clear up your own misreading.
But how about figuring out what we're really talking about? First, "erudite" doesn't mean having read a lot of books. It means "being learned" or "scholarly." We can learn in all sorts of ways. The practice of farming teaches a lot, as does reading Aristotle or Emerson, as does trying to figure out how to get a carburetor out of a 1970 Chevy. "Erudite" has taken on a more elitist bookish tone in fairly recent times.
One can also quote Shakespeare without ever having seen the written Shakespeare. We're seldom educated this way any more, but my parents had that educational experience of routinized memorization of such texts through repeating the teachers' words.
Being an expert at extracting Chevy carburetors doesn't necessarily have anything to do at all with knowing how to spell, although one can still be quite learned. Reading Melville or Emerson or James -- apart from their occasional archaisms -- have much more of a relation to spelling.
Maybe, as LB says, there's some neural link or lack thereof for some people between what they've read and how they spell. I can't answer that issue.
My point was really about Yglesias, though clever attempt on your part to make me sound like I was trying to offend LB and her father. That's just nasty and dishonest.
I also didn't say that anyone in the posts above advanced the "pseudo-theories." That comes simply from experience talking with people who can't spell. So, you misread me there too.
I don't fawn over Yglesias as it seems you do. He's not terrible, like a lot of other writers out there posing as much better than they actually are. But he doesn't give me anything except the vague and sometimes concrete sense that I've already heard what he's saying elsewhere. So, I don't understand the Yglesias fan clubbiness.
Misspelling is lazy, given the prevalence of spellcheckers. But from a long history of teaching undergrads and grads, I find a common denominator to be how well they've read what they're discussing. That's purely anecdotal, however. Maybe you can explain.
And if you want to flame me some more, come over to my site and I'll be happy to engage what would hopefully be a better discussion than this one. Good night.
Maybe, as LB says, there's some neural link or lack thereof for some people between what they've read and how they spell. I can't answer that issue.
You seemed to answer that issue for yourself pretty well when you claimed But the basic thing is this -- bad spelling, especially in one's native language (and not just typos), means you're a poor reader or sometimes just an idiot.
Are dyslexics idiots as well? Recent Washington Post article looked into this and found pretty convincing grounds that poor spelling is the result of a neurological glitch that may affect 20% of the population.
But that's not as fun as showing up and calling somebody a poorly read idiot, so by all means, carry on.
(I totally dig how being in a different time zone makes me look like a rabid stay-up-all-night Unfogged reader by the time stamp.)
Wooeeee....
English spelling wasn't even standardized before sometime in the XIXc (look at Keats's uncorrected originals, for example). Anyone who does any literary scholarship at all has to learn to compensate for spelling irregularities and dialect variations, and this skill even carries over to language study (e.g., "et ou est...?" in French is the same in sound and meaning as the Portuguese "e u e....?" [accents omitted]. A lot of talented people can't spell, and they hire M.A.'s (called "editors" and "secretaries") to do their spelling for them.
The idiot is the person who can't read stuff that's misspelled, for example our Mr Hilde, who 's already whining about the retributive trashing activity he has brought on his own head. One surmises that he has been teaching Writing 101 for far too long.
A darn shame, too, because hating on Yglesias, if done right, is a meritorious activity.
P.S. Dr. Johnson's standardizing dictionary did appear before the XIXc, but didn't immediately change the way people actually spelled.
I doubt your theory, Tom. Spelling comes naturally to me, but it would be absurd to claim that I read more than MY. My half-assed theory (for which I have zero evidence, so rate accordingly) is that spelling proficiency mostly comes down to the manner in which a person learned to read. If, as a kid, you went the whole language route, then you likely aborbed English's byzantine spelling rules by osmosis. If you learned to read largely phonetically, you didn't.
I think Tom's mixed up correlation and causation.
Poor and/or lazy readers, especially students who are inexplicably bored in intro political philosophy courses, often dash off essays quickly and, as a result, demonstrate poor grammar and spelling.
Of course, having poor grammar and spelling could represent any number of things; given that MY's writings themselves demonstrate that he's read others' arguments, it seems far more likely that he's just not as good at spelling as he is at other things.
The only reason it's funny, instead of just plain mean, to tease Yglesias in the first place, is because his spelling mistakes are rare, creative, and here's the kicker, clearly at odds with the rest of his intelligence and ability. If he, say, regularly made unsound arguments or misspelled everything, it wouldn't be fun to tease about misspelling 'assymetric.' It's more delicious that he's a Hahhhhvahhd grad.
That, and I think Labs may have been drawn in by the 'ass'. He's an ass-man.
(P.S. You've a misplaced apostrophe in your post entitled "DC Weekend". Nice blog name, though)
There's also a category of stupid people whose grammar and spelling are correct, but who can't write or think. As rule-followers who respect authority, they tend to be conservative in the sense of "very conventional" -- I imagine that they were Marxist apparatchiks in the old USSR.
Um, "aborbed" = "absorbed."
Spelling comes naturally. Typing does not.
Since I can't seem to help misreading Tom, someone else will have to tell me if he offers seriously, as a possible reading of LB's first sentence in 2, "My father, in his late 60s and terribly good with carburetors, spells like Yglesias."
What I love about this, from Tom's blog...
I forgot all about the Freedom March today -- no, let's present it in it's full grammatically-perplexing glory: "We Support You Freedom March." Shouldn't there be commas or something there?
...is that Yglesias is another one who just can't seem to master the apostrophe. That the error appears in a complaint about punctuation is just the icing.
Labs, that's pretty bad. its/it's is a pet peeve of mine.
My father and a good friend of his once chortled over an article about bad grammar in legal briefs and the judges who were cracking down on it. I'm very mad that I can't remember the quotation from this particular judge, but she made several errors of her own. Having said that, I do think it's worth trying to spell correctly. Spelling isn't something that should be dismissed as hopelessly bourgeouis. (Or maybe it is hopelessly bourgeois, and I'm just willing to admit that that's what I am.) Imminent, eminent and immanent all have different meanings.
It's the Hartman/McKean Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation!
"[Yglesias is] smarter than I [am], but [he is] prey for pedants nonetheless [because my cock is bigger than his]"
It seems to me like the phrase "smarter than me" is fine because "than" acts like a preposition. On the other hand, Wikipedia says it isn't one, and I'm not sure how something on the internet could be wrong.
Re 38: Hooray for pedantry! "Than" is a conjunction. Pronouns joined by a conjunction usually take the nominative, not the objective case. Consider the difference in meaning:
"Labs has a bigger ass than I." (Labs's ass is the larger.)
"Labs has a bigger ass than me." (Labs has a man-sized donkey. No comment.)
The problem is that "than" is a comparitive conjunction—so at times the pronouns under comparison are already in the objective case. Consider:
"Ogged would rather reset the TiVo with her than with him."
"Her" is part of a prepositional phrase, so "him" takes the same case. I leave it to you to supply the individuals to which the pronouns refer.
1) Yglesias has opportunities with two demographics groups in Florida
2) Independence in spelling and grammar is mode of disestablishment, of shattering the shackles of forced conformity in our industrialized monocultured oppressive capitalist hegemony.
3) As a Finnegan's Wake fan, I suspect that he is sending hidden messages using multilingual puns. He awaits his exegete.
It's no accident that McManus shows up when w-lfs-n's away.
OK, ok. Fine. My use of the "word "idiot" was tossed-off and lazy. No theory of idiocy intended here. But you folks sure take it up quickly.
And, to Susan, I obviously don't mean that dyslexics are idiots. And I didn't say that. I said that I don't have the expertise to comment on the relation between language and brain function -- I've done a little bit of phil of mind and AI work, but find the relations between language-function and neurophysiology an incredibly complex issue. I imagine there are many ways in which that relation can be explained. And I have no idea whether good spelling or not even matters much on this count.
Yet, I'm fairly 21st century, where we no longer make the correlation between "idiot" and dyslexia. Maybe you do, as that correlation didn't occur to me at all and I wasn't making an absolute either/or distinction. But if those are our only choices, then that also counts me as an idiot since I have a mild case of dyslexia myself (as well as synesthesia, which makes it all very colorful). To this extent, the several posts implying I'm an idiot have been successful, including yours! Yet, I can manage to spell pretty well, teach very bright students, write papers and books, and read philosophy in a few different languages (and not just philosophy, but other things, including Yglesias's work!), and none of that is easy.
To John Emerson: yes, language evolves and is creative. What more can be said on that? I mean, we're not writing to each other like we're Chaucerian. Yet, many of us can still read Chaucer (or Keats, or Allen Ginsberg, etc.). And even poetry! But it's also astounding to me to compare reading Keats to deciphering Yglesias' misspellings. This is quite a fanclub here.
Of course, most people can read misspelled words, if the misspelling isn't too atrocious and especially if placed in the context of a larger sentence. There's no need for me to defend myself from that silly accusation of being an idiot who can't read misspellings.
But the basis for your claim appears to be that standardization of spelling has something to do with this entire line of comments. I don't see how it does. We live in the 21st century, not the 18th, after all, and have all sorts of different dictionaries and software to consult, which also evolve as language evolves to meet new lived situations, technologies, etc. But should we change our dictionaries to accomodate MY's misspellings? Incredible, if that's the implication.
Never taught Writing 101, by the way -- not my field. Sounds awful.
If, in your 6:50am post, you're referring to my comments again by calling me a stupid apparatchik thinker, that's also just not worth the comment. If you want to engage in some substantial discussion rather than name-calling, I'll take you up on that any day. I don't even need to cite Harvard backgrounds and such to pull the authority trick! Grown-ups who still make constant reference to their Harvard-ness have always struck me as trying to do I'm-the-authority-here short-cut work around the actual inquiry. Far too many people buy into that: "he/she went to Harvard, therefore he/she must be right." And when wrong, it's somehow funny. Besides, here one other example: I have a very close friend who grew up poor, made it to community college and then grad school at a middling-ranked university, did great work there and was invited to the holy MIT on a post-doc, and is now one of the best scientists out there. But he doesn't have that all-too-simple luxury of winning an argument by saying he went to Harvard. In fact, he encounters the opposite.
If you're actually just saying that people can be intelligent and still have poor grammar or spelling, I fully agree with that. No problem there. The conservative/Marxist comment is odd, though. How about William Safire? Allen Bloom? And other American conservative guardians of the proper rules of language, thought, and the canon? If you're actually interested, take a look at Wilson Follett's classic "Modern American Usage." He sifts through the inconsistencies, vagaries, and often humor of American English. And he's a fallibilist about it all, requiring the reader to work some of it out him/herself. An entertaining and informative read.
Apostropher: I think you and I are probably on the same page or at least a similar one. It likely depends on how one has learned to read -- but, further, how one has learned language more generally -- your point about phonetic learning. Reading and spelling are obviously correlated -- how, precisely, is a question I just can't answer.
Cala: maybe you're right there about the correlation/causation distinction. If you teach -- at whichever college or university -- you'll know that a certain number of students are very bright and very motivated, another group may be motivated but struggle through the work, and a third group doesn't give a damn, especially about courses unrelated to making money post-college. The first group is usually comprised of careful readers, careful thinkers, and writers with a sense for grammar and spelling and all that. But you can also have a student of the third group, who doesn't want to crack a book but who can nevertheless at least spell properly. So, there don't seem to be any hard and fast categories here.
Also, if what MY is doing is creative misspelling -- which I hadn't considered -- then good on him. "Assymetrical" or whatever it was is indeed a funny misspelling. But MY himself admits in a comment above that he's a bad speller. We all make mistakes of spelling and grammar. MY is right: that has nothing to do with our moral character or virtue.
Alright, really, this is my final word on this. I still think, despite being called an idiot myself by some of you, that if you hold the kind of position Yglesias does in the public discourse, that you ought to be able to spell. If not, have someone proofread your spelling. Blogland, of course, is notorious for quick writing that's often not proofread, as Cala points out about some misplaced apostrophe on my site. But for someone of MY's public exposure, it's just sloppy and distracting.
Second, I still don't get the MY bandwagon expressed here. That's my preference. Unlike most of you, I don't think the arguments are as brilliant as you think. I don't think they're as original as you think. I don't think they're articles that go around correcting everyone else's misperceptions into right and good ones.
Look, the great Ludwig Wittgenstein couldn't even do that.
39: I'm willing to believe whatever you tell me on this score. But your ass examples don't seem obvious to me. Are they supposed to illustrate a self-evident difference, or a formal distinction that I have to just accept?
I guess I don't understand how the varying use of I/me distinguishes between the body part and the animal, since in this context they're both just things the subject and object possess.
Would someone tell me the origin of the word alright? My 10th grade English teacher was very firm in his belief that it should be spelled allright, because the word was a combination of all right. He seemed to think that people were analogizing from already when they spelled it with only one l.
I should probably add that the second part of your post makes sense to me.
BG, there's a note on "all right" here.
43: In going for the cheap laugh, I may have lost you. Maybe a less silly example would clarify the point.
"Labs has a bigger car than I." (Understood: "than I do.")
"Labs has a bigger car than me." (Since we can't infer here "than me do," it's clear that I am the subject of comparison with respect to Labs's car. So, literally, Labs owns a car that is larger than I am.)
So "smarter than me" means that Yglesias' throbbing thought organ is really huge?
Physically, I mean. I think it's kept in a giant tank of latte in Cambridge, MA.
Tom Hilde, you're clearly not an idiot. You are a douchebag. Not only did you write, "But it's also astounding to me to compare reading Keats to deciphering Yglesias' misspellings"—the finest douchebaggery I've read in some time—you followed it up with, "But should we change our dictionaries to accomodate MY's misspellings?"—setting a new gold standard for smug, preening, vacuous criticism.
48: Okay. That's clearer. Although it seems obvious that in real life one would change the order of "bigger car" in order to switch meanings, rather than choosing between "I" and "me".
And in fact it seems like that alteration would erase the distinction between "I" and "me" (although would begin sounding significantly stupider).
I like it much better when mistakes show up as errors after hittingthe "compile" button.
OK, sigh, now I've got Ogged, FL, and Cala looking for punctuation errors on my site in order to do the "gotcha" bit. Teehee, Tom wrote "it's" when he should have written "its." I also once spelled "occasional" as "ocassional." But, really, don't waste your time unless you're actually proofreading, which I then appreciate. Errors are going to be there. I don't always catch them. As I said earlier, that happens to all of us and the great Wilson Follett was fond of pointing that out. I'm not the first here to cast stones, either -- the original blog post was. But I also don't have the highly-read blog presence of MY, for one thing. I do a blog on the side, time-allowing -- read it or not.
And Ogged, your carburetor comment at 34 is offensive drivel. You've managed to compound your previous offensive remarks, but this time not just to me, LB, and her father, but to auto mechanics as well. Please do stop before you hurt yourself.
"But the basic thing is this -- bad spelling, especially in one's native language (and not just typos), means you're a poor reader or sometimes just an idiot."
"If you're actually just saying that people can be intelligent and still have poor grammar or spelling, I fully agree with that."
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just isn't the same.
I believe ogged's point in 34 is that "good automechanic" is not exactly a standard definition of "erudite."
Either you are a remarkably clever troll, or you have some sort of personality disorder. Let's discuss which disorder that might be.
Let's discuss which disorder that might be.
Are you at all serious? I think that could be fun, but even I am not quite that cruel.
Kidding? My dearest bg, I never ever kid. Mssr. Hilde seems to have offered himself as a case study via his belligerent, incoherent posts. I for one am fascinated by the unusual combination of ressentiment, admittedly snappy prose, and self-contradiction. Moreover, the subject seems completely unaware of the self-contradictions. There is a certain logic to the posts -- some of them -- but he jumps from one topic to another, seemingly irrelevant topic, as you might expect from someone high on cocaine. There is a feverishness to his thoughts.
I am thinking perhaps he is in a manic stage; perhaps also mild schizophrenia.
what can be meant by the phrase "out of their solipsistic asses?" The bloggers in question have asses that do not believe in the existence of other asses? Asses that question whether other assholes are actually full of shit, or just have the appearence of being so? And when they talk out of these solipsistic asses, does that not refute the asses -- for to be a conduit for another, one must admit that the other exists, yes?
re 24
This seems like a teaching fallacy. The ability of teachers to assign people grades can provide apparent confirmation for a teacher's pet theories if they are not careful.
I've skipped around a little bit in comments, because, horror of horrors, I actually have some tasks to accomplish today. But can it be that no one has questioned the bizarre implication of 24 that one should "care about" a blog (which I take it means "read regularly," as this is the normal way one demonstrates caring about a blog) iff the blog "rattle[s]your world, t[eaches] you something really new, radically alter[s] your perspective on an issue for the better, [or] educate[s] you?"
The second and last of those criteria aren't crazy, but when they're all run together it makes me wonder what blogs Tom H. thinks meet these lofty standards?
Why are you guys still engaging this tool?
I think we're trying to plumb the depths of his toolocity. It's a fascinating exercise.
cause I missed out on it earlier, and because feverish machinations interest me, Chops.
I think you just wanted to jump on at the end and win this thread. But it shall not be.
Sure. Feel free to play, but it seems fairly self-evident to me that he's just fucking around with you guys, initially trying to score points against a fairly large fish in the blog pond in a venue patently inappropriate for said activities, and then just posting self-righteous blather to get everyone all het up when his initial tactic didn't work. I guess my point is that by plumbing his toolic depths, you're giving him exactly what he wants (just like flashers get off on people getting upset).
"Ogged would rather reset the TiVo with her than with him."
"Her" is part of a prepositional phrase, so "him" takes the same case. I leave it to you to supply the individuals to which the pronouns refer.
False dichotomy, since the answer is clearly
"Ogged would rather reset the TiVo with Standpipe Bridgeplate than with Standpipe Bridgeplate."
How would we decide between Chopper's interpretation and one alternative, viz.,
Tom Hilde is himself being played, since he has been prompted to post long and rather weird posts defending strange positions on a forum largely devoted to making fun of him.
? Hard to know.
Blogland and the internet in general contribute to awful, awful grammar and spelling mistakes. I suspect it's because there's so much terrible writing out there, that if one only reads other terrible writing, the terrible writings sneaks into one's style all stealthy-like. It happens in other cases, too; trying to write a coherent essay having recently read Faulkner is an exercise in editing longwinded sentences into tasty chewy bits.
My students are sufficiently motivated. By fear, or by love, or by sparkly purple fire accompanied with windchimes.
I don't recalling saying that Yglesias is brilliant or earth-shattering, but dude, a misspelling in an otherwise well-crafted argument is really just a misspelling. It really doesn't signify much else besides the need to print the text, turn it facedown, and proofread through the reverse of the paper.
proofread through the reverse of the paper? Only after lashing myself with burning birch branches, donning a shirt of human hair, and rubbing my nose in dog poo.
It works, though! It shuts off the portion of your brain that sees what letters it expects, because your brain is too busy trying to figure out why all the letters are backwards.
But if you think the birch branches would help......
Proofing backwards, it seems, would not help one catch mistakes like omitted words or the correct usage of "to" and "too."
But it's also astounding to me to compare reading Keats to deciphering Yglesias' misspellings.
My point was that before sometime in the 18th century, nobody could spell, so what's the big deal? I'm a good speller and in favor of good spelling, but your theory that people who spell badly think badly is stupid.
My comment about stupid people who spell well wasn't intended personally. I was just filling out the paradigm: stupid people who spell badly, smart people who spell well (the normal forms) -- plus smart people who spell badly and stupid people who spell well (the abnormal forms).
If all people who wrote well spelled well, editors would lose a lot of billable hours.
It would seem that assholes cannot be solipsistic, since by definition they mediate the internal and the external. Considering the importance of asshole-like forms (sphincters, doors, windows, ports, estuaries, etc.) in reality generally, that's a pretty profound statement.
But should we change our dictionaries to accomodate MY's misspellings
Two 'c's, two 'm's, dude.
(As for why I'm pseudonymous, note what this guy does for a living.)
Folks --
I'm not a "troll" -- no need to get paranoid about the guy pulling one's leg, where if you pull back you're caught in his leg-pulling trickery, thus getting yourself lost in a blogosphere hall of mirrors. I'm also not comparable to "dog poop." Not "delirious" or "schizophrenic." Not an "asshole." Not a "douchebag." Not trying to insult any of you (except for the guy who called me a "douchebag" and "smug, preening, vacuous," blah, blah, blah and who I then told to "bite a fart"). I do not have a "personality disorder."
Read your own posts, especially #1-7. The nastiness already existed here.
I have already said my initial use of the term "idiot" was too cavalier, and backed off that comment. I never equated bad spelling with stupidity, although I never ruled out that possibility either. That distinction is indeed a logical one -- sufficient versus necessary conditions. Try the logic again: being a poor reader can entail being a poor speller, but being a poor reader or poor speller does not necessarily entail that you are unintelligent. John Emerson seemed to have finally got that in #73.
I also grade my students fairly -- grad students. They're about as excellent as you can get, though it is also a truism in academia that, especially with undergrads, many do not want to be there and it shows in their work. In the US, many undergrads have never learned to write (including spelling) prior to coming to college. The name-calling and the part of many of you commenters is juvenile, but without knowing anything about my teaching, to imply nasty things about that is putrid.
As for Yglesias, I just don't think the stuff I've read by him is all that good. That's all. I'm sure there's plenty of stuff I like that none of you would like (you're certainly fond of calling me the foulest of names). But the fact remains that not one of you called me on the Yglesias statement about the quality of his work or gave me any substantive evidence otherwise except for the usual platitudes for blog heroes. I'm not into blog hero worship.
If you have a piece/link by Yglesias that you think is truly exceptional for the clarity, originality, and force of its argument, please pass it along. I can overlook spelling errors -- I do it all the time -- although I still think it's incredibly sloppy for someone of his stature to publish work as such.
Tom--does it help you understand the reaction to your comments a little better if you realize that one of the people commenting in 1-7 is MY's roommate? Or that several of the others cracking on him have exchanged extended correspondence with him, both privately and publicly. That Matt occasionally comments here?
Well, of course, some of us here think that Yglesias is a punk, as I more or less said, but that wouldn't have been as much fun to blog about, nor on topic either. Perhaps Ogged could invite serious dissing of Matt.
Tom, it's all very nice to back off now and react with surprise that people came down on you harshly. But your first comment fairly clearly indicated that people who spell poorly are poorly read, and even idiots.
That is a fairly spectacular statement that richly deserves harsh response, which you then received, and which you might implicitly have acknowledged with your subsequent retraction.
"I never equated bad spelling with stupidity," except for the 'idiot' comment, which in common parlance does indeed mean something like that. You have retracted, thanks, but most of our response happened before this backpedaling.
The fact that MY doesn't push your buttons is another issue altogether, and one on which reasonable people may certainly disagree. It's neither here nor there with regard to your earlier incendiary comment.
Confession: first draft I wrote "neither hear nor their" which is pretty bad for the 6th grade spelling bee champ. How the mighty have fallen.
Note also that the first paragraph of 42 is about the most graceless retraction ever.
That's not how dragonslaying works, Hildebrandt. If you have some specific reason why you think his work is overvalued—i.e., some lapse in his judgment, items of consideration he has overlooked, or whatever—and you think this is the right forum for debating with him (refer back to comment 25)—then have at.
I called you a douchebag because you took swipes at Yglesias vis-a-vis misrepresenting several other commenters here and then accommodate in a crack specifically regarding poor spelling. I think the only reason you've backed off your claim that poor spelling is associated with idiocy is that you keep misspelling words. Otherwise, you haven't offered a single reason why many of us should think less highly of Yglesias than we do.
And it's totally acceptable to maintain a minority opinion around here—see two Instapundit links on Ogged's blogroll, for the proof in the pudding—but, dude, you gotta back your shit up.
82: "and then misspelled accommodate"
One of these times, somebody is going to mispell "misspell."
How bad a speller is Matt? So bad that he mispells his very own name -- every damned time. Anyone with a lick of Spanish knows that it has got to be *I*glesias.
Where do they find such maroons?
bostoniangirl:
Please, no more! I cringe!
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001061.html
How do you add the "is" back into these examples?
- He's inviting more people than just us.
- I saw no one other than Bob.
Clearly, "than" is a preposition in these instances, and, I posit, it can be a preposition whenever it wants. Besides, if "than I" is really correct, then fewer people get it right than wrong. (This is hard to confirm, because googling "than I" gets a lot of "than I am" and "than I would" and such, but I think a survey would prove me correct.)
I almost had to stop reading Atlas Shrugged because of all the me/I pretentiousness going on.
OK—there were two Instapundit links up there other day, right? Must've been momentary BS on Ogged's behalf.
One of these times, somebody is going to mispell "misspell."
pdf23ds, see 39 and 48. "Than" is a conjunction. In the examples you sit, nouns and pronouns in the objective case are being compared, but it's not "than" that is doing the objectifying.
More trouble than it's worth? Maybe. I think it's worth breaking the rule in a novel, but not in a paper.
My position on "smarter than I am"/"smarter than me" is that either is acceptable, but "smarter than I" and "smarter than me am" are both unacceptable.
Armsmasher, I completely agree. "than" is a conjunction.
In the examples I cite, *something* is putting those pronouns into the objective case, and that something is grammatical. The same something, whatever you want to call it, makes "than me" grammatical.
I don't think it's a matter of being too much trouble or not. I think it's a matter of misguided perscriptivism and hypercorrection. Hypercorrection makes a worse impression on me than a number of common errors.
"Smarter than me am" is imperfectly terrible Bizarro-speak.
Since i know you're all so interested in my opinion.
the record is quite clear that I never called anyone "dog poo" or "dog poop" but rather summoned the image in an attempt to demonstrate how masochistic it would be to force oneself to proofread one's written work in the manner bg described.
I have called people lots of other unsavory things, and will continue to do so.
Mssr Hilde: if your only point was to say: "I do not particularly care for Matt Yglesias' writing," why did it take you so very many words to do so? And should we consider that point a very valuable addition to the discourse?
He's inviting more people than just us.
In this example, "more people" is the direct object of inviting; were you to use a pronoun here, it'd be "them," not "we." So, "us" is the right, objective-case pronoun.
To provide the counterexample, you could correctly write
"He's inviting more people than we."
to compare the number of people y'all are inviting. But that'd sound all wrong.
And I agree about hypercorrection. There's enough then/than conflict in the world to keep language mavens permanently employed, anyhow.
"Than" is a conjunction.
is that than which nothing more incorrect can be thought.
Re: 89
I know of at least one other person who has had some trouble spelling a variant of 'misspell' in comments on this site. This would be funnier if the person was SB, rather than me.
The record is quite clear that I never called anyone "dog poo" or "dog poop" but rather summoned the image in an attempt to demonstrate how masochistic it would be to force oneself to proofread one's written work in the manner bg described.
He's been so consistently misreading things like this that I have to think he may be yanking our collective chain. He's either a clever troll or much less perceptive than his writing would suggest.
Yes. It would be more interesting if he were not a troll, and instead an odd cognitive case, but it is more likely that he is a troll, in which case I have gummed myself up in troll goo.
w-lfs-n, "Smarter than I" is perfectly acceptable.
As others have pointed out for me "than" is a conjunction, not a preposition.
I will agree that using the nominative after a preposition is really awful. The worst part about that mis-usage, is that the people who do it are usually trying extra hard to be correct.
"Between you and I" is the classic of this type. It always makes me cringe, and a lot of otherwise well-educated people say that all the time, e.g., Bill Clinton.
My other pet peeve is the overuse of the reflexive as in "Bob gave Sandra and myself tickets to the Coldplay concert."
"Me" is a wonderful word when it's the right one.
I don't think it's entirely clear whether or not "than" can be a preposition in certain circumstances. (I would say that it can, of course.) But since it can't really be decided a priori, there's probably not much point in discussing it.
Really, I just wandered onto this site through looking at my own sitemeter and then seeing some of the comments. I didn't know it was a kind of Matthew Yglesias club. Now I understand the "dragonslayer" remarks too. Sorry to offend all the Yglesias friends and roommates.
I still don't like being called a douchebag, dogshit, scum, or whatever other language you speak here. But I apologize for my "idiot" comment nonetheless, although you will still have noticed that it was not directed at any of you who called me these names.
I'll just read MY's present article in TPMCafe and post some comments on my blog, Phronesisaical. I'm not trying to get you to visit there, and don't bother if you want to continue the flaming. But please do visit if you're interested in something resembling a dialogue. I reserve the right to delete comments with "douchebag," "asshole," and other name-calling whoever it's directed at (apart from POTUS).
I didn't know it was a kind of Matthew Yglesias club.
You just can't be gracious, can you? It's not a "club." Several of the people here know Matt in real life, and consider him a good friend. Some of us think he's smart and writes good stuff. Some of us think he's a snotty kid who talks out his ass. But pretty much all of us agree that trying to dismiss Matt with pure BS about the link between spelling and intelligence is toolirific (in the bad way).
Last post for me here. I tried, and how many times has someone been called the names you folks called me, then apologized for my poorly put remark, then continued to try maintain a discourse by spending the time to post a real response to MY's post? Not one of you did the same. And, man, Ogged, go buy a punching bag or get some muscle relaxants or something.
I've learned something here. Many of you are an angry bunch. Nothing to see. Move along....
Ciao.
Hehe. Really, I doubt it's some kind of mental illness. Tom seems to be coming from a very different mindset, in which the sort of criticisms he set out of Yglesias are simply humorous, not remarkable. I know some people like this.
Oh, assuming he's not trolling, of course.
TH,
C Ya.
I looked for some discussion at your blog but, dang, no comments to see there.
Yes, I think that's right. Odd cognitive case it is! I am cleansed of goo.
Here is a recipe for happy blogging:
1. Identify some other person as an ass.
2. Express shock and dismay that you could have been taken for calling anybody an ass, you asses.
3. Take back what you said, in a manner that allows you to repeat it anyway.
4. Express shock and dismay.
5. Repeat.
Perhaps the following step is already implicit in text's 5, but I wanted to make it explicit:
Issue an apology of the form "I regret that you did X, and I'm really angry that you were so unfair to me."
Later attempt to gain the moral high ground by pointing out that you apologized.
I also left out: plug your crappy blog before making a final retreat.
Man, I spend a day in court (nothing even remotely interesting) and I miss my dad's being accused of carburetor-related expertise. Not so much -- my sister can find her way around a carburetor, but not my dad.
OK - attractive, single, athletic, surgeon who knows her way around a carburetor and (IIRC) is an archer. I am beginning to suspect you are making this sister up. Not nice, LB. Not nice.
She's not an archer. I'm not sure what I said to lead to this impression, but she has no archery skills whatsoever.
And what do you think it's like being related to her? I used to show her off to dates: "Look, unlikely though it may seem, I share approximately half of her genetic potential. Impressive, no?"
A specialist in melee weapons, I take it?
OK. How shall I nerd for you this evening?
How about the infinitude of primes? That's always a crowd pleaser.
I was looking for something along the lines of "Tom Hilde is a tool," but play to your strengths, SB.
To quote a friend: "that guy ain't a tool; he's fucking Home Depot"
Suppose for the puposes of showing a contradiction that there is a greatest prime p > 1. Let P be the set of all primes = p + 1 > p, which contradicts that p is the greatest prime, and we are done. Otherwise, if n is not prime, then n has prime factors; let q be such a factor. Now, none of the elements of D divides n, since by the way we constructed n, they each leave a remainder of 1. So q is not in D. Since D is the set of all primes
D should be P, but Tom Hilde is still a tool.
Play to my strengths, indeed.
Those greater and less than symbols make for some serious dada in 126.
I hope you all will look past that sorry performance, and instead see that brilliant gem of nerd humor as it exists in my mind.
It also exists in the email I received when you posted the comment. I can recreate it, if you like.
No no, the moment has past. Let the blog speak for itself.
Pshaw. Screw what you like.
Suppose for the puposes of showing a contradiction that there is a greatest prime p > 1. Let P be the set of all primes <= p. Now let n be the product of all elements in P, plus 1. Clearly n is at least p + 1. Either n is prime, or not. If prime, then n >= p + 1 > p, which contradicts that p is the greatest prime, and we are done. Otherwise, if n is not prime, then n has prime factors; let q be such a factor. Now, none of the elements of D divides n, since by the way we constructed n, they each leave a remainder of 1. So q is not in D. Since D is the set of all primes <= p, q must be greater than p, but this too contradicts that p is the greatest prime. Therefore Tom Hilde is a tool.
Now can you make all the Ds be Ps? Let's not do this halfway.
Suppose for the puposes of showing a contradiction that there is a greatest prime p > 1. Let P be the set of all primes <= p. Now let n be the product of all elements in P, plus 1. Clearly n is at least p + 1. Either n is prime, or not. If prime, then n >= p + 1 > p, which contradicts that p is the greatest prime, and we are done. Otherwise, if n is not prime, then n has prime factors; let q be such a factor. Now, none of the elements of P divides n, since by the way we constructed n, they each leave a remainder of 1. So q is not in P. Since P is the set of all primes <= p, q must be greater than p, but this too contradicts that p is the greatest prime. Therefore Tom Hilde is a tool.
--by Standpipe Bridgeplate
Just how badly do you want me? I'm thinking "a lot".
Are you suggesting you had other motives for giving so much attention to the care and feeding of my comment?
Oh. How embarrassing. Instead of sex, let's have awkward silence instead.
Instead of sex, let's have awkward silence instead.
The line between the two can be so thin at times.
Hang on there Bridgeplate! Ogged is almost engaged to my daughter. Keep your indeterminately-gendered hands off him.
The line between the two insteads.
Hey wait a minute. Labs calls Yglesias the Butcher of Baghdad and then links to a picture of him dressed as a terrorist? Has he been watching Fox News again?
BTW, Ogged, YOU NEED TO WORK ON YOUR GAME.