I AM BEING tempted by a series of very stupid arguments into continuing to answer lame and stupid assertions that are easily brushed aside. The one this morning based on an assertion that using homonyms and synonyms in current use in common, everyday English means I'm a bad writer. Though I doubt the idiot is smart enough to understand that's what I'm being accused of. It's the kind of baseless crap that pop-prescriptive grammar and writing would be moral codes are made of. The assertion is that someone reading a sentence I wrote would mistake the common phrase "for good" meaning permanently to mean that I was asserting that Covid-19 is a good thing. While someone who has spent their eternal adolescence peddling pop culture and their senescence at Eschaton might do that - though I doubt even they are that stupid - when I write something I assume the readers are reasonably intelligent adults or children who could master such distinctions.
No, too easy, it would have been callow and stupid if it came out of a 12-year-old or some pseudo-intellectual such as those who did that crap in the 1970s (William Safire, Edwin Newman) or earlier when that dolt, E. B. White revived and updated his idiot Cornell writing teacher's incompetent list of self contradicting demands. The chance to link to that article again is the major reason I'm writing this.
My old cat is more sly and cunning and clever when she figures I'm not giving her the attention she wants.
If I listed the synonyms and homonyms used by those dolts and their buddies, it would probably fill the entire screen. I'll bet most of them skate right past them without ever thinking twice about the other meanings (not to mention pronunciations) of them. But, then Strunk and White said stuff that was only slightly less stupid and such idiots believe them to be experts on the topic of fine writing. For the record, I have always thought E. B. White's supposed skill as a writer was based on him and his buddies peddling him as the such. Kind of like how Benny Shapiro and Stephen Fry are successfully peddled as intellectuals and skilled debaters among the stupid. It's all advertising, peddling crap to the susceptible.
Update: "Boris Badenov" formerly known as, and the idiot called himself this, "Skeptic Tank" is just pissed off because the one or two times he tried to argue with me I kicked his ass. He's an idiot post-literate with a STEM degree (I suspect in some quasi-science surrounding computers) who thinks Eschaton is some kind of athenæum.
Update 2: Anyone who believes anyone except someone too stupid to read it in the first place would believe "Every time I read more about this pandemic the more I am afraid that this is going to change everything for good," means I am afraid it was going to change things for the better is too stupid to be giving critical advice about writing. Anyone who believes anyone who is that stupid is to be believed in their criticism is an even more credulous sucker who willingly gives people reason to believe they might just BE that stupid. Apparently there are such people at Duncan Black's "brain trust" (yes, they really have called themselves that unironically).
Don't
worry, this has about run its course, I've got to get out in the
garden, it's just it rained here yesterday and I've been waiting for the
greenery to dry off.
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