SpasticSage wrote:Please don't make me an unperson for it.
Unperson...? Whoa. That's pretty strong ju-ju... You'd have to be like.. A televangelist axe-murderer republican or something.
I just... I get started.... and I just. can't. stop. *sobs*
It's not that I don't mind interrupting the flow of a story to hit the books... It's just that I don't fully agree that you're
reading the story if you don't. When you decide to skip one word because it's one you don't know, you technically jump the line between actually reading the story and reading the longest possible cliff notes version, you know? That is, of course, a million miles away from the end of the world... It's just one of my wierd little obsessive
things.
I have rather a lot of wierd little obsessive
things.
Like, if someone has a honest-to-god different opinion from mine (ex: apples taste better than oranges), I can let it go eventually... But if they're demonstrably wrong and they
think they only have a different opinion (ex: the first amendment gives me a right to post whatever I want on a forum) I am almost incapable of letting it go until I'm convinced they're just too stupid, ignorant, obtuse, or combative to ever 'get it'. (not that I'm saying this situation is
either of those... This conversation is still evolving.)
It's particularly fun when one of my wierd little obsessive
things locks horns with what even I accept as inevitable reality.
For instance, I know language is mutable, living, and prone to inevitable change... And that while some of that change will be enhancement, most will be degredation. Yet I can't help feeling that the continuing degradation of language is costing us humanity, and will continue to do so.
If that's true, then what amount is ok? If littering sucks, is it ok if I only throw one paper cup out the window a year...? Or a week?
And what about the Bashir-Whorf hypothesis... Which puts forth that on any given sci-fi television show, you'll have at least one alien who speaks better english than the average american college graduate?