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From: diamond@diamond.csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Newsgroups: comp.org.usenix
Subject: Re: BOF Announcement - Netnews User Interfaces (yet again)
Message-ID: <10346@socslgw.csl.sony.JUNET>
Date: 12 Jun 89 02:11:12 GMT
References: <8906032109.AA13764@net.bio.net> <695@galaxia.Newport.RI.US> <1989Jun7.213924.22994@utpsych.toronto.edu> <3287@epimass.EPI.COM>
Sender: news@csl.sony.JUNET
Reply-To: diamond@csl.sony.junet (Norman Diamond)
Organization: Sony Computer Science Laboratory Inc., Tokyo, Japan
Lines: 31

dave@galaxia.Newport.RI.US (David H. Brierley) writes:

>>>Pardon me for being overly picky today, this just struck me as a humorous
>>>tip of a frightening iceberg.  Don't they teach English in our schools

>raymond@psych.toronto.edu (Raymond Shaw) writes:

>>but mixed metaphors are ok?

In article <3287@epimass.EPI.COM> jbuck@epimass.EPI.COM (Joe Buck) writes:

>And so on.  David posts a spelling and grammar flame, and Raymond
>demonstrates that David himself is fallible as well.
>
>Folks, there's a reason why spelling and grammar flames are discouraged
>on Usenet.  By Murphy's law, any time you criticize someone's grammar
>or spelling, you'll make at least one blooper yourself, and someone will
>flame you.  And so on.  So if you must flame, please do it by mail.

This is generally true, but one of those flames really was appropriate.
When someone professes (at least by insinuation) to be a grammatical
expert but his posting is riddled with grammatical bugs, he kind of
deserves to be flamed.  It is like a poor programmer professing to
answer someone's question, when in fact his proposed solution is worse
than the original problem.  Yes even the experts are fallible, but one
should notice the relative frequency of the failures.

--
Norman Diamond, Sony Computer Science Lab (diamond%csl.sony.co.jp@relay.cs.net)
 The above opinions are my own.  However, if you see this at Waterloo, Stanford,
 or Anterior, then their administrators must have approved of these opinions.