General statements of minor grumpery

Uncategorized 1 Minute
  1. Don’t try to use the heart symbol in anything on the internet, ever ever ever. You instead will get a pipe: |. Also, you’re trying to use a heart symbol. Just stop!
  2. That thing that ships your twitter to LJ is pointless and a mild annoyance.
  3. Sentences beginning with “Check out…” are forbidden.
  4. When you say ‘Muah!” to indicate an air kiss, you make others sad and tired.
  5. If you’re reading this, you’re rich. This may seem surprising, but it’s true.

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29 thoughts on “General statements of minor grumpery”

      1. Feel/think
        I think it was Paul Fussell,
        or maybe Gore Vidal, who said that it got
        on his nerves when people would say “I feel that [subclause]” instead of
        “I think that [subclause]“– as if their
        power of sentiment were so developed that
        it could take over for their actual consciousness in,
        say, feeling that the yuan
        being pegged to the dollar has advantages
        as well as disadvantages.
        I say 1) they should pick their battles, and 2)
        just maybe “I feel that [subclause]”
        is just a combination of trying to
        sound non-committal while, incidentally,
        reaching at sounding formal (which is something
        that often produces malapropisms in people without
        great practice in it).
        (And anyway, “I feel like [doing something]”
        is immune to this whole consideration, because it’s an unrelated
        idiom. “Tengo ganas de…”, etc)

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      2. Re: Feel/think
        “Check out…” is usually a marketing sin, and in this category I include newsletters and broadcast emails from friends.
        When I’m paying attention, I remove the “I feel that” or “I think that” completely because of course I think this, I’m writing it! It’s one of the Omit Needless Words things.
        I know I fail a lot though because this is such a colloquial medium.

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      3. Re: Feel/think
        IMHO [hahaha], omitting “i feel that” and “i think that” (and “kind of” and “maybe” and other weak words) is a matter of choosing the proper register. those phrases don’t belong in formal/persuasive/expository writing, but they’re useful when you’re talking to irritable people. putting on a superficial show of submission helps soften them up, calm them a little, make them think that they have some control – which helps you convince them to listen to whatever you were trying to say.
        “check out” is always dumb though.

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  8. I’ve started emailing people about #2, although it seems to have done nothing. If I care, I’ll subscribe to the person’s updates directly in Twitter. If I don’t, I don’t want to see every last little update on LJ. If there is a truly interesting and fun conversation snippet, then it can be manually pasted into one’s blog without much trouble, perhaps with a little commentary about the context.

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