Hi, Michael R. Brown > > if you really were the snobbish, "traditional presciptivist" you say you > > are > > I didn't. "As a traditional prescriptivist regarding the backbone of > language, I don't go with the trendy second meaning." I note you didn't > quote me - purely accidentally.
What were the quotation marks I did use doing, I wonder? They weren't scare-quotes. Hmm. Perhaps, as I understood my non-accidental actions, I was using your words while adding an additional ascription of my own to describe the communal object you were describing (i.e. you). > > you would _not_ have looked up the meaning of a word in Wikipedia, the > > antithesis of snobs. > > As we see, and as is so often the case these days, this is a detection of a > non-existent contradiction. Oh my! the royal We! It must be, for I still fail to see the non-existent contradiction. (Or rather, your extreme economy of style has continued to elude my crude meaning receptors.) > > Say what you will about its virtues, there ain't no backbone in a thing > > that can changed by whim or will. > > Which Wikipedia is not. Here's some fun recursion: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reliability_of_Wikipedia Meh. I realize they've tightened the standards of their editorial processes, but there's still less of a backbone on wikipedia than "traditional" sources of information with more stringent editorial apparatuses. For, if the staff of wikipedia _did_ tighten their ropes, it would ipso facto begin looking a lot more like traditional sources. The entire point of wikipedia's ethos is to not have those ropes. Which again, is not to knock the virtues of wikipedia. It's just that the ethos is specifically against the ethos of snobs, as every democratic ethos is. Or, as I'm not expert on wikipedia, but do know some snobs and was more joking around than anything else, perhaps wikipedia is the font of knowledge we might replace the OED, Liddell and Scott, and a host of other traditional reference works with. I have to admit to not really being the best judge of that. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
