Ignorance

Real American cheese that tastes like plastic, and goes well with a hot dog.

My Brotha!

 A rec for you and your poor, locked away T.V.

What I find alarming is that I know 2 kids 1yr+ older who know how to mouse and click video games and cant read a lick.

No, I’m kidding. I agree that many people don’t understand why proper usage of language is important. The idea that “you should still understand” irks me (I’m not talking specifically about maid tu rek…non spelling is his thing…but the idea in general). Not conforming to standards for communication limits your ability to express yourself.

I liken this to colors. If we only had eight different colors or so, we could describe something as blue or green, but not teal, azure or indigo. If something is teal and you say it is green, you could be technically correct, but you’ve left a lot of work for whoever else is partaking in the conversation.

Now that being said, posts on a blog or message board shouldn’t really be expected to conform to the same standards. I only read about four words of the fatty thing before zoning out. I read about half of yours before zoning out, ‘cause it’s crazy long and smacks of old man in his rocking chair on the front porch.

But I get your drift, know where you’re coming from and feel your pain.

true playas eat chevre and not any of those cheeses of the proletatiat.

But seriously, I think the backlash from fatty’s lack of standard grammar and maid tu rek’s lack of standard spelling is silly. As long as there has been rules/conventions for written language there have been some who have been less strict about following those rules.

I say let him (or her) who has never spliced a comma, dangled a preposition, misused a semi-colon or creatively spelled a word cast the first verbal assualts against the grammar non-conformists.

I have several dyslexic friends and other friends with reading trouble. You never know when a person might have a language impediment of some sort, so I try to be understanding. Also, one of my dyslexic friends hates spellcheck because it can change words COMPLETELY on occasion and totally eviscerate the meaning of the passage or replace simple things like you’re and your.

Where’s the Havarti in your poll you elitist pig!

No Roquefort? God that stuff is incredible.

I know. Sometimes it feels that way, but i assure you it’s not. As long as people continue to enjoy good writing it will exist. What the internet does is bring all the terrible writing we would’ve never seen and just ignored to a place where we can see it in all of its ugly glory. There has always been bad writing, but never before have so many people been able to “enjoy” it.

Dont worry though, you can always just ignore it, which is exactly what people have been doing (unbeknownst to them) for hundreds of years.

Bill O’Reilly would be frothing at the mouth

As Dave has said, it’s fairly certain that fatty is well-aware that his style (of punctuation and other things) is against the norm. So is Maid Tu Rek about the phonetic spelling from what I have discussed (and joked) with him in the past. Both seem to display no typical form of a writing disorder such as dyslexia, but I’m no specialist on that.

An HR or admissions officer who has to judge a person initially from the way she or he writes might reject an applicant who hands in such a document, but here we should be less formal. Sure it’s extravagant, but as I already posted in fatty’s article on the main page so were a number of professional writers in the English language and other languages who used style over substance. And that’s not even the case here: If one takes the time to read a few of their posts, it’s easy to see that they do have a lot of substance and knowledge of all things Blazers. Are they perfect in their analysis? No, nobody posting here is, not even Dave, and he is often darn near close.

Does it distract me somewhat (and sometimes a lot) from understanding the content and cause me to skip a few comments? Yes (also because English is my third language so my reading comprehension while good enough is not on “native level”). Are they doing it on purpose to look unusual (or rebel against something which you insinuated)? I’m not sure, but they and some other posters with an unusual style do a heck of a creative job standing out and getting attention, no? Do they disrespect people by writing this way? No, at least not intentionally to annoy people I suppose. And I can understand why someone would feel attacked when criticized for their way of expression all the time even though I don’t appreciate the “elitist” retort.

I hope they can explain that better themselves.

      and forced reading. That sounds very familiar.
My brother and I hated summer school and forced
reading, but with reading comprehension comes
grammar & spelling proficiency. It is very difficult to
read BD’s posts, but he’s par for the O-live course.
The grammar & spelling is horrible. BE is a welcome
read when compared to most posters on O-live.
     By the way, maid tu rek might be Fatty’s other screen
invention. The opinions expressed, combined with the
terrible sentence structure, spelling and grammar lead
one to believe they are one and the same. If not, then
seperated at birth, with difficulty !

A friend in college who was not a student once told me that I am “educated but ignorant.” I replied by saying that his comment revealed that he is both uneducated AND ignorant.

His dad was married four times. His current wife and all his ex-wives were very obese. He advised his son (my friend) that fat women make ideal wives because no one ever makes any moves on them.

None of this is germane but I wanted to make this comment IRREGARDLESS.

what’d I miss?

Fatty’s schtick doesn’t bug me, Maid Tu Rek drives me nuts…

Whatever.

what the heck is ignorance, anyway?

Many believe ignorance is defined by any combination of the following:

• Failure to adhere to prescribed forms in speech and writing. A lot of fatty-bashing is of this sort.
• Lack of formal education—either in a general canon, or in a particular subject area.
• Lack of sufficient life experience, or experience in a particular vocation.
• Lack of interpersonal skills, both in terms of nonverbal communication and persuasion (charm, charisma), and in terms of inference-drawing ability (street smarts)
• Lack of intellectual curiousity
• Lack of cognitive ability.

So be careful you you call ignorant.

Sure, there are some jokes and it’s generally good natured, but honestly, it looks like a vehicle for airing an online conflict and getting people to sympathize with you. As such, the humorous portions are overshadowed by the petty rivalry, no matter how well disguised. An essay on eloquence would have gotten your point across without having to trek through muck to get there.

if you play a note you didn’t expect, but it sounds good over the chord progression you open up new territory for yourself, sometimes the best ideas come from a mistake. That’s why sometimes ‘maid’ is really fascinating to me; sometimes ‘wrek’ takes a solo and parts of it are sound right or ammuse me, sounds like hit hit some polyrhythms that crunched your groove though, bummer bro.

Things like not knowing the difference between their, there and they’re drives me nuts. I hate text-message abbreviations. Grammar is an extremely important part of communication. Grammar should be required study in grade school (like it used to be). Does that make me an arrogant elitist?

However, being a grammar fiend is no excuse for refusing to communicate. Just because someone has poor communication skills doesn’t mean that we ignore them, or not bother trying to understand what they are saying. That would be arrogant elitism. I learn things from those who are grammatically accurate and from those who are not. It just takes more work to understand those who aren’t.

And I certainly don’t claim to be perfect myself. That would be arrogant elitism as well. But correcting someone’s grammar doesn’t make one a tyrannical overlord (I do other things for that), it is simply helping them to communicate better in the future. Still, some tasks are too daunting and time-consuming to bother. It’s just easier to let it go, and simply wade through it to find out what they’re saying.

In short, I complain about grammar, but everyone else who complains about grammar is an arrogant, elitist idiot.

…

P.S. What’s wrong with elitism anyways? Don’t people want to be the best anymore? Or is it only socially acceptable to be just like everyone else? The opposite of elitism is conformity. My guess is that we need a little of both.

with the other comments concerning the cheese poll. Come on now, you are really proving that you are not an elitist by having the weakest Safeway variety cheeses fill up the poll. However, maybe you were assuming that none of us would have heard of exotic cheeses from throughout the world. In that case, you would be elitist.

I do agree that, as nice it is to hear from Fatty, the translation from “12sharks” was much better. We have people that translates Rudy’s or Batum’s blogs.

Expecting to read decent English does not hint at lifestyle, class, or elitism. I am sure there are very few of us that will ever be able to have courtside photos taken with professional athletes. We just paid attention in skool.

I have a friend who’s SO (who is from a rich family) just spent $350 on botox, and now they don’t have money to pay the deductible for their car accident this morning… and probably won’t be able to afford their share of the mortgage, and just recently didn’t didn’t get my friend what he wanted for Christmas because “it was too expensive”. They don’t seem to understand that botox (and a constant flow of new clothes) is a luxury… OMG it’s essential!!! Mortgages? Insurance deductible? House upkeep? Food? Doesn’t that stuff “just happen”?

That is elitist.

Wanting good English? It’s not all that far from the above in that you get used to something and can’t accept any less. The biggest difference is that there’s no money involved, and anybody (barring major learning disabilities) is capable of good English. You can’t fault a person for not having trendy clothes as not everyone can afford it, but after a certain amount of time, anybody that can’t create even the most basic English (would it kill ya to make coherent sentences?) just doesn’t care (again, barring major learning disabilities). There’s nothing wrong with pushing for “more” from yourself and those around you either.

I guess what I’m saying is:

Kudos to Fatty for getting his post in lights

Kudos Fund A Mental for standing up for what he believes in

Kudos to Dave and Ben for running a awesome Blazers sight

and UnKudos to everyone that’s upset about Fatty or Fund A Mental

(just for the record, I just skip Fatty’s posts)

First, no mention of string cheese, one of mankind’s greatest creations.

Second, as a father of an ADHD/Dyslexic child, I kind of find the posting of Fatty’s prose on the main page sad. It’s almost like it’s done to make fun of him. If he really writes like that then I feel sorry for him and don’t think it worthy of such a headline post, it seemed as if we were being invited to make fun of him. Maybe a fanpost, but not something posted for everyone to read as if it is newsworthy. Just my “tu sents” worth…

and to anyone who is claiming “Fatty’s writing style is postmodern!” I ask you, do you actually KNOW what postmodernism is? can you give it a definition? Here is a hint, the answer is NOT “anything that is outside of normal convention”.

back to hoops, folks. discussion over.

I’m late to this, so I don’t mind if no one reads this, and everything may have already been said, but here goes:

When people find out that I am earning a doctorate in English, they inevitably comment that they have to be careful to mind their grammar around me. This never fails to amuse me, as grammar is (obviously, at times) the least of my worries. Grammar is a series of conventions that only hold sway through popular usage and hegemonic submission. Capitalizing the first letter of every sentence is only "correct," because people say it’s correct. Once people stop saying it’s correct it is no longer correct. Now I’m not saying that that is the case, but if a large group of people recognize and propagate "teh kewl," then a new grammar is already in place and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

Now, as an elitist university liberal communist who only has what she’s got because of her candy-coated lifestyle (such as the dirt-floored building I lived in as a kid), I recognize that print culture in the eighteenth century gave birth to grammatical regulation and universal spelling. That’s why Shakespeare doesn’t phrase things or spell things (or capitalize things) the way we do. But we don’t yell at him and ask to censor his writing. Instead we claim it to be poetic and somehow superior to our own (antiquarianism at its finest).

Anybody who knows anything about me on this site knows that I hate moral relativism with a fiery passion. tl;dr: you cannot chastise fatty and keep Shakespeare on his pedestal. If you do not understand his writing, you have a choice to make: become literate in his grammar or ignore it. But do not thump your Strunk and White and expect everyone to fall to their knees.

I wish I could rec this post twice.

u ruuuuule

He’s the Manny Ramirez of Blazers Edge, some people hate him and others love that some people hate him.

I had a hard time choosing between mozzarella and provolone. I chose mozzarella because I love Pizza though.

REC!

to use established rules of good writing in their fanposts and comments. It seems courteous to the reader, like swallowing your food before you talk. Initial caps helps me see quickly where a sentence begins. A period helps me see where it ends. Correct spelling and grammar means I don’t have to re-read or guess from context what the writer is trying to say.

Some creative and thoughtful people struggle with the fine points of writing. I would hate for fatty and MTR not to post or comment on BE if they felt that the work involved in making what they write meet certain standards was more trouble than sharing their thoughts with us is worth.

The same return-on-investment principle applies to us readers. If we find fatty’s or MTR’s writings too frustrating or too much work to read, we can go elsewhere. We might miss an interesting thread, but that’s the tradeoff.

Likewise, if fatty and MTR want to include those readers with a low pain threshold in their conversations, they will make an effort to make their text more readable.

Seems silly to me to get upset about any of this.

We’re down to the dregs of the conversation now, and for the most part it’s not pretty. People accusing each other of stuff. Rightly or wrongly, I don’t know. I suppose the point that matters more to me is that it’s not horribly helpful even if it’s justified. What does it really bring to the conversation or the site? There are insightful posts too, of course. But we’re losing traction and spinning in the same mud.

Here’s my take. I never liked Fatty’s style much, as I said in the main post. But Fatty always served as a boundary of sorts around here. He was kind of the outer edge of the community. If your post went beyond Fatty-ness, you knew you were out of bounds. In the last few days I’ve read several responses that, to me anyway, went far beyond anything Fatty said on the main page, which was actually somewhat reasonable. The response to Fatty has been more telling than the words of Fatty themselves…and in many ways uglier.

And this is the point, I suppose. Once upon this time this community could handle a Fatty without breaking. There were bumps and bruises…plenty. But basically part of the pride in this community was that Fatty did belong here in a sense…that you could take someone with his harder-to-read style and occasional abrasiveness and turn it to the good. He was a cult hero of sorts, in fact. Many people loved him. (I was never among those, I suppose, but I still found the Fatty phenomenon interesting.) Fatty belonged not only because of the points he made, which are usually honest and blunt and stand on a par with most others, but because the community was one that could make good come out of whatever was put before them, even if it was different or difficult. There are many positive ways to take Fatty. Some actually like his style. Some like his personality. Some find humor in his prose. Some appreciate the buzz that surrounds him. Some just accept that other people like him even though they, themselves don’t. There were a few dissenters, but mostly they passed on quietly and let other people enjoy the Fatty thing while they enjoyed theirs.

That spirit seems in short supply. One thing about which the original poster here was incorrect is the “positive maelstrom” of comments. There are plenty of negative or worried ones in the main page Fatty post and there were many more, only they were so abrasive or accusatory or against site rules that I had to delete them. It’s not good enough that 99.9% of pizzas come without anchovies. NOBODY can eat anchovies ever, or enjoy them in our presence.

Apparently it only takes one Fatty post—and a relatively mild, topic-oriented one at that—to fracture this community. Not everyone, to be sure. Most people are doing what they’ve always done…looking for and participating in good conversation. But enough of a fracture that we get all of this name-calling, barbed-posting, and the like. What good does it do the conversation? What good does it do the site? This fault line doesn’t speak well of us, IMO. We’re all going to have to be practiced in turning difficult into good, or at least being able to skip over the difficult and still function, on our way to the Blazer Promised Land. There will be plenty of trials along the way. (Anyone remember losing in the NBA Finals and how much that hurt?) Looking for the best in people and conversations—at least in public, no matter what you think privately—would be a good practice to pick up again.

In any case, I think we’ve done enough of this for now. I am closing comments in this post and in the main page Fatty post. Maybe we’ll revisit this sometime. For now, onward.

—Dave