Xref: utzoo alt.flame:14197 alt.sex.bondage:2308
Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cs.yale.edu!news
From: news@cs.yale.edu (Usenet News)
Newsgroups: alt.flame,alt.sex.bondage
Subject: Re: THE SACRIFICE (of the English Language)
Summary: Shut the hell up!
Message-ID: <11702@cs.yale.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 90 15:23:35 GMT
References: <408@danish.UUCP>
Reply-To: jellinghaus-robert@yale.UUCP
Followup-To: alt.flame
Organization: Yale University Computer Science Dept, New Haven CT  06520-2158
Lines: 53

In article <408@danish.UUCP> mikey@ontek.UUCP (Michael E. Lee) writes:
>	I could continue at this, but unlike the subject of my
>criticism, I don't want to bore anyone.  Let me just quote one
>more short passage.

This after he has already quoted two extremely long passages and dribbled
about how lousy their style, grammar, and spelling is.  _You_, Mr. Lee, 
already come across as being FAR more pompous, didactic, and arrogant than
Mr. Bond ever will.  Not to MENTION boring.  There is NOTHING more boring
than a spelling/style flame, as anyone with a tad of net experience should
know, and to PUBLICLY POST such a waste of net resources is stupidity of
the highest order.  Your criticism should at the most have been _mailed_
to Mr. Bond.

Of course, the capitalized words and underscores in the previous paragraph
will probably trigger your style filter, and you will discard this posting
without reading further.  Such is the closed-minded way of the style fanatic.

>	To give Mr. Bond his due, "The Sacrifice" was labelled with a
>warning, where he wrote, "If you don't particularly like rather intense
>stuff, I think you might want to 'n' past it."  Nice for the sexually
>queasy, but not enough.  Shouldn't he have warned off those who don't
>"particularly like" awful writing?  It seems only fair.  I for one feel
>that all poorly-written stories on the net should hereafter be headed
>with something like "Warning!  Reading the following may cause your
>participles to dangle!"  I'm tired of reading halfway through an
>article only to find that it's badly drafted.  Or how about creating a
>new news group solely for pretentious pseudo-metaphysical hack writers
>with delusions of talent?

I have a MUCH better idea.  How about a new newsgroup, "alt.anal-retentive.
grammar.dweebs", purely for people like yourself to post spelling and style
flames about any article your tiny minds choose to condemn?  If you truly
object to stories that are badly written, by all means WRITE SOME YOURSELF.
We'll compare your masterpieces of finely tuned prose to the verbal dribble
you so abhor, and you know what?  I'll bet your stories will be passionless
and dry compared to "The Sacrifice."

Rules of style are fun, but when someone chooses to defy them to achieve an
effect (as was the case in "The Sacrifice"), or when someone is ignorant
of them (as with many of the foreign-language speakers on the net), postings
such as yours do nothing but inflame tempers and waste bandwidth.  Keep all
such small-minded flames in email ONLY, please.

>			    -- Matt ("Pain Is My Life") Cavanaugh

Nice .sig.  Now prove it by writing some stories!


Rob Jellinghaus                | "Next time you see a lie being spread or a
jellinghaus-robert@CS.Yale.EDU |  bad decision being made out of sheer ignor-
ROBERTJ@{yalecs,yalevm}.BITNET |  ance, pause, and think of hypertext."
{everyone}!decvax!yale!robertj |     -- K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_