A silly digression on nits and how to pick them.

Kieran Mullen · 14 Aug 2008, 04:08 · from 2008-August.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: kieran at ou.edu (Kieran Mullen)
Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:08:11 -0500
Subject: (urth) A silly digression on nits and how to pick them.
In-Reply-To: <mailman.2949.1218655140.28212.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.2949.1218655140.28212.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <F5C2FE21-5E2A-4DDA-A605-2388ABB84652 at ou.edu>


On Wednesday night I read:


> Message: 5
> Date: Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:18:57 -0400 (EDT)
> From: brunians at brunians.org
> Subject: Re: (urth) A second dream team: Mucor, Oreb, and Pike
>
>
> Why is it important to you that other people should conform to your
> standards of correctness, Mark? If you understand what they are  
> saying, is
> it really necessary that you point out to them that they are wrong?  
> Why do
> you do this, if it is not necessary?


And  I immediately thought:

    "Eye suppoze  ewer rite.  If  ewe can sea watt peephole are saying  
itz  knot raleigh kneaded two poynt out tooth em that they are rung."

    Mr. Millman may have been a bit exasperated in his corrections,  
but they were short and to the point.  I learned something from them.   
We should aspire to use these unfamiliar words correctly.

Kieran "Should anal-retentive be hyphenated?"  Mullen


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