So once you find an hour or two to read over this letter
Couldn't possibly be Ben. It takes much longer than that to decipher what he's trying to say.
The tone is about right for ben, but he would never send something so riddled with errors.
(Except for brilliant the post to the NYT readers. For that I'll forgive Ben a lot.)
2 is correct. 3 is less so, speaking grammatically.
The crap e-mail referenced really doesn't sound like it was written by a native speaker of English. It has that Nigerian spam kind of flow.
I can't read that shit.
The crap e-mail referenced really doesn't sound like it was written by a native speaker of English. It has that Nigerian spam kind of flow.
This is not inconsistent with Ben.
I think it reads like a native speaker of English who has received substandard training in punctuation and is overly fond of his thesaurus.
That letter really is unreadable. It has that true opaque or translucent quality. The words are present, but resist interpretation.
4: It's just the combination of extreme pretentiousness with little actual ability to write.
7: I don't know what the fuck kind of thesaurus has "inadequatecies" in it, and I don't want to know.
I don't know what the fuck kind of thesaurus has "inadequatecies" in it,
Elitist.
and I don't want to know.
Head-in-the-sand elitist.
Also I'm about 99% convinced he meant "adequate" rather than "antiquate", how the hell do you "disarm" a fallacy, and also he didn't mean "fallacies", I don't think.
Verdict: dude has a tenuous grasp on the language, at best.
Verdict: dude has a tenuous grasp on the language, at best.
Indeed.
...a stormy disarray of masculine uneasiness.
New mouseover text?
3: that nyt post is one of the best posts i've ever read anywhere.
Goddamit. That guy's writing is so bad he broke me.
Verdict: dude has a tenuous grasp on the language, at best.
This, alas, is no proof that he's not a native speaker of English. To teo's analysis in 7, I'd add that he probably reads very little and/or doesn't process language visually, so "antiquate" sounds enough like "adequate" to seem plausible.
"All intensive purposes," anyone?
God, I can't finish it. He's a modern-day Mr. Collins on acid.
I know someone who talks like Marcel writes. And that is exactly how he asks a woman out. I once actually heard him tell a woman that she was "looking particularly toothsome."
If I manage to become a professor, I'm going to tell my students that "plagiarism" means using a thesaurus and that you can get kicked out of school for it.
I once actually heard him tell a woman that she was "looking particularly toothsome."
Nice smile or meaty legs?
modern-day Mr. Collins on acid
That is wonderful!
24: and her speech was particularly noisome.
It's OK, read, we know you're not a native speaker.
Also, you don't appear to be a pretentious blowhard.
Nice smile or meaty legs?
Delicious pie.
i'm like afraid to comment here
This is an exactly correct use of like. read, I don't think anyone is mean about screwy English written with good intent. This letter is crazy because the bad English is here like an amplifier, it says much more than the writer intended. Maybe like someone clumsy and old doing carefully rehearsed hip-hop dance steps while wearing the wrong size clothes.
I once actually heard him tell a woman that she was "looking particularly toothsome."
Oh man.
That email reads like it was written by someone auditioning to be a character in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.
Actually, I think the metaphor of disarming a fallacy isn't that bad. St-phen Menn gave a really interesting talk here earlier in the year about the Sophistical Refutations and the post-Socrates sophists and their practices, etc.; if your doctrines were the object of a (as he put it) target sophism (he singles out the third man argument as such a sophism, actually, and claims Plato got it from actual sophists), it would be helpful to know how to disarm it.
noisome
i'd say noiseful :)
someone clumsy and old doing carefully rehearsed hip-hop dance steps
that would be awesome, i mean the dance steps, not Marcel's writing of course
I feel sorry for the guy.
I suspect he got a date with someone totally out of his league (been there!), had an awkward time on the date (been there!), and then tried desperately to impress her even though he doesn't have a clue how to do it (thank god my dating days were pre-email).
But it's more fun to mock him if we picture him as a pretentious blowhard, right?
That letter is not so much unreadable as it is illegible, or rather not illegible because indeed it consists of characters formed and decipherable, but ineligible: unqualified for the human eyes it was meant for. As I gazed at it, dazed, bored, uninterested, indifferent, apathetic, I could only think that reading the first sentence was enough.
Yet I would be utterly glad and grateful to see you in this way before you go back home for the summer, thus I am assuming you are going back home, etc.
Wow.
"Disarming a fallacy" wouldn't be bad if that was a good metaphor for what he was doing.
it's more fun to mock him if we picture him as a pretentious blowhard Eli Lake
I would buy 37, except that his letter, even if well-written, would still be self-aggrandizing.
What he's aspiring to be is pretty loathesome - a self-regarding, show-offy know-it-all. It's not like he was clumsily trying to be hip, or intellectual (in the sense of conversant with the life of the mind). He was clumsily trying to be a broody genius, or something (it is a bit hard to tell through all the malapropery).
I will admit that, at least from what I could wade through, he seemed willing to throw a few bones at the woman, and self-deprecate a bit. But all that really shows is that he's at least somewhat familiar with human socialization.
41: You know what? Despite the image over at Jezebel, I think I actually was picturing him as Eli Lake.
-of course, after 37
Marcel and Lidia sound incompatible names
that's why you people got bored imo, plus the language maybe, i also skipped many sentences
but that's my attention deficit
I hope, in this comment, dear reader, by the suitable dispensation of such techniques as, diction, onomatopoeia, and cunnilingus, to illustrate the substantial esteem for you, that you yourself provoke in me, that I hold you in, in substantial degree.
COMES NOW the onomatopoeia: Bloop
Maybe like someone clumsy and old doing carefully rehearsed hip-hop dance steps
You mean like this? Or more like this?
Lidia broke things off after learning about his criminal record, but she owes a debt of gratitude to Marcel, who in the space of two dates taught her the enduring lesson[...]
Uh, he actually appears to have gotten his second date, so I think this letter should count as a success.
I was willing to believe it was genuine until I reached this point: "These hints concerning a furtherance of our relational interaction consisting of entertaining events..."
Now I'm convinced it's a revival of the barber character from A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
I'm with 37.
I'm all for deflating the pretensions of powerful men who behave like assholes, but...this guy doesn't seem to fit that category at all. Is that his real name that has been posted at the website? and did he give permission to have his letter/email publicly broadcast in this way? This just seems cruel.
Is that his real name that has been posted at the website?
No.
The title of the feature ("Crap Email from a Dude") certainly doesn't imply that those mocked will be powerful.
All dudes are powerful. Dudeness is a route to great wisdom, ancient techniques, and mystical power unknowable to the undude. Like the force, though, dudeness has a light side and a... dork... side.
This guy wasn't being passive aggresive or sullen or any of the other crap things you hear about so much in the crap e-mail field, he just sort of seems like a loser. I feel bad for him. Not enough to stop making fun of him, but I do feel bad. His inantiquatecies on display like this; it must be unpainless.
This just seems cruel.
That's what Pentheus said.
In an odd way, while the internet frees up a lot of gratuitous cruelty, as we all would have acknowledged on the thread we were right not to have this week, it can have the opposite effect. It can enable the kind of pity and sympathy for someone like this that would be hard to express irl, certainly if you were likely to attract his amorous attention by doing it, or just from us bystanders.
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All you transhumanist freaks can start planning your infinite robot futures.
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34: I met my boyfriend b/c he was impressed that that title was on my "favorite books" list on my online perv profile.
("Antiquate," etc., I bet are the results of poor spelling + implicit trust in spellcheck.)
'antiquate', he wanted to say old-fashioned, that's all
i read it all now and it's funny
it sounds as if it were a stylization or a parody of Beckett, imho, i've read last last week Molloy, Malone dies and the Unnameable, so very very enjoyable
65.1: I don't think he did, read.
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Way #576 in which Unfogged rocks: I just called mrh from a car dealership to chat about his Prius. (I did not buy the overpriced, high mileage, used one available to me and he was super-sweet and helpful and his enthusiasm convinced me to plan for a minimally more expensive new one instead.)
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All nixed, unchosen relationships, with their indecipherable trains of thought, will become antiquated by their inadequacies.