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"UNUSUAL WORDS" APPLAUDED
Harry Heidelberg, Margo Kingston’s Webdiary stand-in, is revelling in his new role:
I am intrigued though by the fascination with language in some quarters (spelling, grammar and the like). I think that people need to write in a way that they can be understood but beyond that, they should not feel excluded just because they may not be polished essay writers. Other blogs and internet based commentary are filled with one-liners. Chimps can do one-liners. I’d rather a real person explain their perspective, complete with unusual words, rather than a glib one-liner. That’s what Webdiary is about though. Always has been.
“Always has-been”. Not a bad one-line description of Margo, that. Actually, chimps are notoriously incapable of one-liners; much like Webdiary correspondents, they prefer to chatter and shriek and make up their own words.
I’m unfair. Margo has composed some excellent one-liners over the years. Here are a few favourites from 2002.
UPDATE. Activist chimps are no thappy!
"Complete with unusual words”? What, does he mean thesaurus-hunting for effect (a trick that any sane English teacher will warn you against) or using words from foreign languages which aren’t very familiar? Making up words? Making like Humpty Dumpty and deciding that a certain word means whatever you want it to, regardless of what those nasty old hardliners at the OED want you to think? Or just garden-variet misspellings?
Just curious. It’s such a random thing to bring up in this context.
Look, I wrote more than one line! I’m a Real Girl!
No, no, no. Comedians do one liners. Chimps fling feces.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 03 19 at 02:43 AM • permalinkThe Agent Y, if she could not bear other than polished essay writers, she would be long since of the slit wrists.
Crikey, though ... if you’re going to postulate populism and proscribe pedantry in your pretensions of punditry, at least try to make some fargin’ sense.
Agent Y of the Spelling & Grammar Police
Knight Defender of the ApostrophePlanet of the Apes was a political advertisement?
Henry Heidleberg is really a mutated form of Clem Kadiddlehopper, minus the laughs.
They are paid writers.
But in typical socialist style, they will never admit they are paid to be good writers.
And, indeed, they are crap writers - their writing is leaden, unreadable, stodgy, ungrammatical, unenlightening, cliched, tribal shit.
The style infects all their publications, but especially their news opinion columnists and their lifestyle writers.
Fairfax journalism trudges along like Russian soldiers looking for the next vodka and not finding it.
Socialism lost.
Fairfax is yet to find out.
It is a news organisation.
Go figure.
"Chimps can do one-liners. “
Can not.
bc — I tried that one on my one good English teacher once, when my essay came in short. He replied, “But it is not solely witty.”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 11:32 AM • permalinkChimps can do one-liners.
The left, on the other hand, favors howler monkeys.
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 11:33 AM • permalinkChimps can do one-liners.
He said, in his soundbite for ABC…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 11:35 AM • permalinkI hate to quote a hippy with approval, but as Joss Whedon once wrote: “Reading makes our speaking English good.”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 11:36 AM • permalinkKevin Kline: Apes cannot read Nietszche!
Jamie Lee Curtis: Yes, they can, Otto, they just don’t understand it…
A Fish Called Wanda
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 11:46 AM • permalinkAnother overlooked Margo quote:
It looks like the Border Protection Bill COULD have retrospectively allowed our troops to detain people and force them out of our waters."
Ah, yes, those retrospective border guards… “You know, ensign, perhaps we could have tossed those refugees to the sharks, now that I look back on it...”
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 01:02 PM • permalinkMore words composed by chimps
contextualisation
asymmetric
multicultural
multilateral
grande
vente
the arbitrary adding of the suffix “ism” to words (reflecting not so much an effort to identify a trend, belief set or movement as a tendency to mumble)Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 02:09 PM • permalink"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself… Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
I’ll tell you who said it as soon as I’m done whitewashing this fence.
Posted by Jim Treacher on 2005 03 19 at 03:05 PM • permalinkWhitewashing a fence?
Ah-HA!
Teilhard de Chardin! No....
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2005 03 19 at 03:09 PM • permalinkcujos to Dave S…
“I’ve just been for a look at that Tim Blair site. There’s a lot of comment on Webdiary and how incomprehensible it is for the Blair bloggers. Well no wonder - none of them seem able to write more than a line or two at a time and it’s all diabtribe, such as this:
In the run-up to the war, the lefties were predicting Iraq would be levelled, hundreds of thousands would die, and millions more would become starving refugees.
Now Iraq is a disaster because it isn’t Switzerland yet.
Sod off, swampy.
Posted by Dave S. on 03/17 at 11:20 AMThat’s quite typical. It was a bit like finding yourself in the middle of a teenage pyjama party. I must confess, however, to finding it rather entertaining in a perverse sort or way. Forget the latte or the charonnay - strong drugs would be more useful at Blair.
Oh well, I guess everybody finds their niche eventually.
Posted by: Phil Uebergang at March 19, 2005 07:34 AM”
Thanks loads, Hanyu (#14). Now I have a headache.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2005 03 19 at 09:14 PM • permalink
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Finally, Webdiary hits back. This what you’ve been waiting for isn’t it? Another diversion. Good work.