Silliman's Blog

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Call me cynical, but I had my doubts about Sundress's "best of the net" from the start.

Rik (who's always looking for fresh and innovative ways to be cynical about poetry)
 

So-called "zero tolerance" aside, there's far too much indulgence with people who either can't spell, or can't properly punctuate these days. The ascent of the internet as a medium has had a very bad influence on written practice. When it started, many people simply refused to capitalize words at the beginnings of sentences, and/or proper names and places, etc. When I arrived at Berkeley back in the mid-1960's, I was accustomed to being allowed to misspell words at an atrocious rate. I was quickly disabused of this habit by "intolerant" professors and TA's, and thank god for that.

Today, on the radio and television, one hears examples of crude inaccuracies of grammar nearly every minute. The most common, and objectionable, mistake I constantly hear everywhere (and from otherwise well-educated and intelligent speakers), is the subsequent clause "which I told him to do that." I hear this error so often, that I'm beginning to fear it threatens to become acceptable practice. "Massive" for large, when it really means dense.

Politically correct behavior now seems to dictate that so-called "ethnic" speech, filled with all kinds of "creative" errors and ignorant gaffs, cannot be corrected, since this might constitute a form of discrimination or intolerant condescension.

If those who give us the news can't be expected to speak grammatically and with sense, how can we be expected even to know what the news is, much less what it means.

Poetry, of course, is a different matter entirely, and deserves to be judged and measured by a different standard, one in which punctuation and non-syntactic constructions are simply other tools in the manipulation of language toward creative ends.
 

Very encouraged by the comments stream after the ridiculous Eagleton article. Many of the commenters said that the communist left was dead, and that they supported democracy instead.

When will the left give up on wanting to destroy its opponents, and simply go for the Madisonian notion of factions?

Answer: they won't. Nothing could ever could convince Pol Pot, Kim Il-Sung or Terry Eagleton that they were not only wrong, but on the side of absolute evil.