The reason why I'm not a fan of sloppy language is that it often indicates sloppy thinking. There are people who will be personally offended by that thought, and they'll push back on it by saying things like, "We're all sloppy about certain things," usually as a defense of their own sloppiness. But just as a stupid person can't imitate a smart person, a person who's sloppy with his language can't make himself seem intelligent no matter how well intended or well structured his arguments are. Misspellings and grammatical errors suck the dignity and seriousness from one's thoughts. (Of course, if you're surrounded by fellow stupid people, this doesn't matter.) Now, it's impossible to achieve perfection: I, for example, remain a work in progress and will be so until I die. Go back in my archives and cringe at column-inch after column-inch of terrible writing. Anyway, here's something truly sloppy. I can understand the intention, but it's hard to appreciate the wit when the sloppiness is so... front and center:
Okay, so who's being called a "racist, sexist, homophobic Nazi white supremacist"? Trump, right? So who's "being called garbage"? If I'm not mistaken, Biden said that about Trump's supporters, but the left is currently trying to cover for Old Joe. So who's the "he" who's pulling his punches? I know from current events that this is a reference to Joe Biden, who's the guy calling Trump (alongside all the lefties calling Trump) a sexist, racist, etc., etc. But you can't use a pronoun without a noun somewhere nearby: the pronoun refers to and replaces the noun. If you had no context for the above and simply read it as written, you'd have no idea who was calling whom what, and who was pulling punches.
I know: people will roll their eyes and say that I should expect memes to be sloppily written. And I do: my general expectation is that most memes will be sloppily written and sloppily thought out. Memes are like witty one-liners ruined by stupid comedians. I try to give them as compassionate a reading as I can because there's no hope of correcting every misbegotten meme for grammar, mechanics, and logic. By being so tolerant, though, I merely become part of the larger problem: the acceptance of sloppiness. In principle at least, we should always be vigilant and never accept sloppiness. In my America, one test for your ability to vote would be to have you write a short essay or a long paragraph on a political topic that's motivating you to vote. If the essay is sloppy in terms of language and logic, you would not have the right to vote. If you can't express a coherent thought on something you are theoretically voting about, you should be kept far away from the polls.
Anyway, if you write a tweet or a blog or something else, try your best not to be as sloppy as the above-quoted chump. Sloppiness only makes you look stupid.
QUESTION: why are so many programmers so laser-precise when they code but complete idiots when they write regular prose? I think there must be various types of stupidity.
"...why are so many programmers so laser-precise when they code but complete idiots when they write regular prose?"
ReplyDeleteAs a recovering programmer myself, I can answer this: If human readers threw an absolute hissy fit and refused to communicate at all every time they saw a misplaced punctuation mark, you can bet programmers would be a lot more careful with their writing. I share your sentiments on sloppy writing, but I think it's actually a pretty cool feature of human intelligence that we can usually parse even poorly formed code (language).
Hmm, I was expecting a link to my blog as an example of sloppy language. No writer is totally worthless; he can always serve as a bad example.
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