[MD] Irony

[Matt Kundert]

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.