Hate Mail

Oh, I don't care what the superannuated twerp says about me.  No one who finds him credible is anyone whose opinion about anything matters.   Last time it motivated me to do some research into Noah Webster who turns out to have been a far more admirable person than I was brought up believing and who had to settle for an important but merely incremental reform in written English.  It was interesting.  

Thank heavens for free internet libraries that have old books, the kind your public library is throwing out to make space for computers.   I don't know, maybe it's for the better that those books will be read, if at all, in pixels instead of ink on decaying paper.  The simpleton in question, though, won't read anything comprising evidence because, as the favorite whine of the lower level Frosh goes, "that's haa-aaarrrrrrd!

And if this didn't allow me to make that point about Noah Webster and free online internet books, Project Gutenberg, Archive.org, etc. I wouldn't have bothered. 

Update:  Is it any wonder that a simpleton can't understand it?  Two Sentences 

The stupefaction  of the American People through the New Speak of TV level small words and short sentences has led to college credentialed mid-brows not being able to recognize longer sentences with longer words as English.   That largely PR created mental debility, created by the official and stupid adoption of Strunkian-Whitian dogma has become endemic in the American untellectual class, many of them one-topic highbrows, everything else not above a sadly lowered average, who  have positions at even elite universities and other venues of establishment repute. 

Update 2:  From Geoffrey Pullum's article just linked to: 

I am quite convinced that The Elements of Style harms students more than it helps them. Yet the Google search term {Strunk White "Elements of Style" site:harvard.edu} calls up nearly ninety hits. Replacing harvard.edu by mit.edu yields more, about 140. At Princeton it's 23. At Stanford it's about 95. The finest universities in America continue to insist that this awful little compilation of century-old peevery is an important accessory for today's literate student. It isn't. The difference between carrying around The Elements of Style in your backpack and carrying around a slide rule is that slide rules gave accurate answers.