Over the weekend I finished two books:
Why Orwell Matters
by Christopher Hitchens (READ IT) and Language of the Third Reich: LTI: Lingua Tertii Imperii
by Viktor Klemperer (I could say READ IT – but you would seriously have to be as obsessed with totalitarian systems as I am – it is an exhaustive obsessive book about the language utilized by the Nazis – the calcification and distortion of the language – and it is AWESOME – but only true obsessives could make it through it.)
And now – appropriately – I am reading Robert Conquest’s (one of my idols) new book The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History
. I am TEARING through it. He’s so damn unbelievable – talk about breath of fresh air. He is just amazing. He and Hitchens are kindred spirits in many ways. Hitchens actually dedicated Why Orwell Matters to Robert Conquest (“with his permission”). Conquest is one of those big-picture guys. He always was. Big picture guys are usually hated. They are not listened to. Conquest’s experience was not unique. It’s those people not attached to any one ideology – it’s those people who distrust fanaticism of ANY kind, be it left-wing or right-wing – Kaplan is in that group, Naipaul is in that group, Rebecca West is the QUEEN of such a group … These people who can rise up and actually see things clearly – even with their own belief systems and prejudices – Orwell is in that camp as well, of course – and look at HIS reputation in certain circles. To this day he is despised by many – and also consistently misunderstood and misappropriated. Hitchens’ book addresses why that is, and why conservatives don’t understand Orwell when they think he is on their “side” and why liberals don’t understand Orwell when they think of him as an enemy to their “side” – People want to simplify Orwell in order to make him more palatable and everyone is kind of missing the boat on that score. Hitchens goes into this in his typical awesome contemptuous way. Hitchens hates rigid ideologues just like I do! heh heh Hitchens also opens his book with a poem written by Conquest about Orwell – it’s all just so … incredible. If I want to have a guide through the totalitarian, fascist, and communist nightmares of the 20th century – I want it to be Hitchens. Or Orwell. Or Conquest. Or Rebecca West. These are the people I trust.
I HIGHLY recommend Hitchens’ book, by the way. In case you didn’t get that from my ranting and raving.
And I am DEVOURING Conquest’s latest. One of the great things he says in the book is that so many current day problems come from people who have politics as a “mania”. Like politics is EVERYTHING to these people. This echoes something Robert Kaplan has said on numerous occasions. That “apathy” is often a GOOD sign for a society. Kaplan doesn’t find low voter turnout distressing – he finds it encouraging. It’s the fanatics, the ones who politicize everything, the ones who insist that their “side” has to be right – and COMPLETELY RIGHT – who have the potential to run everything into the ground, and insist on the centralization of the fringe mentality. Conquest put it much better than I just did – he has a whole section on this whole political-mania crowd … which really resonated for me.
Since Orwell does seem to get (mis)appropriated by pretty much everyone, I didn’t realize he was hated by anyone. (Except outright totalitarians, I guess, but there are a lot fewer of those than there are people who have tendencies toward it they themselves don’t recognize and who spot all such shades in their political opponents.)
No, he is hated and reviled by “the left”. He’s seen as a traitor and also – it is as though he is being mistaken for his own message. Like you see the words “Orwellian” left and right – and sometimes it seems that people use it to mean that he actually supported such a totalitarian system.
But if you want to read about the major hatred of him in certain circles – read HItchens book. Nobody knows “the left” better than Hitchens!!
Yeah, Orwell was reviled for writing Homage to Catalonia among other things.
I’ve been slowly working my way through his collected essays – amazing brilliant stuff, much more so (IMHO) than 1984 and Animal Farm. The man had a mind like a razor blade.
Oh his essays, Dan … yeah. They absolutely blow me away!!
I think that those who hate him hate him because he was RIGHT. (Not “right” politically – “right” as in “correct”). Nobody likes to admit they were completely mistaken in their whole worldview. heh heh
By the way – I meant to comment yesterday that I think it’s so funny and cool that your first memory of going to a movie is Candleshoe as well. hahahaha and that you remember the preview!!
What is it with the Candleshoe thing? Why THAT movie?
This puzzles me.
And it came out in 1977 – which was, obviously, the year of Star Wars – and I know I saw THAT in the theatre – but Candleshoe came first.
VERY STRANGE.
While I admit to being a bit of a political fanatic myself, I am distrustful of those whose first instinct in every situation/issue is to wonder about the politics involved. These people are truly fanatical, and often get caught up in the emotional detritus of any given moment while being willfully incapable of viewing the long term ramifications and effects. For example, legislation has become a “we win, you lose” absurdity wherein most of our elected officials appear to have lost sight of their jobs–which is to help govern our society. I, for one, applaud “gridlock,” and agree wholeheartedly that “apathy” can be seen as a sign that things are operating well enough that there is no driving need for passionate, overly wrought demonstrations of political angst. People like Orwell and Conquest are disliked because they reveal the immature, mush-minded, frantic posturing that passes for sober thought among our governing class. Conquest would have been among peers, and a valuable asset, at the Continental Congress.
It just reminds me of that brilliant movie Election.
Who the hell wants to be Tracy Flick? A bitchy little know-it-all, a bureaucrat in training? Obviously many do! And they are running things!
Bah. Bores. Pompous ignorant bores.
I also can’t stand the kneejerk protection that political fanatics have for their own “side”. I so don’t trust those people. Those people would forgive anything if it was done by one of their own.
But speaking of the Continental Congress –
Let’s remember that way back then Thomas Jefferson let it leak in a “private” letter that he felt that John Adams was speaking “political heresies” on this or that point – he didn’t NAME Adams but of course everyone knew that was who he referred to – and it was this word – “heresies” that made Adams realize what he was really dealing with, in his old friend Jefferson. He was so offended by the thought that disagreement with Jefferson meant you were “heretical”.
Now I can think of many present-day examples of this kind of fucking bullshit – so I would say that not too much has changed.
“Heresies”? Oh, so you need to “believe” now? Totally? And if you don’t “believe” in every single point on the list then you are “heretical”?
That’s what has happened to Hitchens. That’s what has happened to anyone who doesn’t line up neatly on this or that side. That kind of nonsense was too evangelical for Adams, and it’s way too evangelical for me.
Sorry, just getting back to this. You are right about all-or-nothing politics. It has been around in one guise or another for a long time. I also note a certain discontinuity in my previous comment. I say I don’t like “we win, you lose” politics, yet I applaud gridlock–which is its natural result. So, even those with the best intentions are subject to a little political hypocrisy. I guess what I am most put off by in our current political heirarchy is its relentless narrowmindedness. An intelligent human knows that he/she is unlikely to be right all the time. It can hurt, but I like to find out when and where I am wrong, so that I can stop making a fool out of myself.
I completely agree about the dangers of we win, all-or-nothing politics. What the far right and the far left have most in common is that they both lust for tyranny. The specifics vary – the right wants to take away our porn and the left wants to take away our hamburgers, etc., but they both want nothing so much as to control our lives. Lurching back and forth between the two is the definition of a no-win situation as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, once you get in one of those cycles, it seems fairly difficult to get out…
Well, that’s the whole thing. Joseph Ellis wrote, in regards to the constitution – that all it did was “ensure that the debate goes on”. I find this comforting and I agree – it’s almost purposefully unclear about certain things – heh heh – but I’m telling ya – the zealots want to win once and for all. They want the debate to stop.
Okay, Stalinists, good luck with that AWESOME plan.
Morons.
I think, Mike R, that tonight I will have a hamburger WHILE watching some porn!
FREEDOM!!
Sheila – my biggest pet peeve about modern life! AAAAGH! The need to have the state solve every problem instead of letting us handle it like adults. We’re turning into proles, drones…
I remember writing a post waaaaay back based on an odd dream I had – odd because when I lose sleep, things build up for a week or two and then I have a spate of strangely linear dreams: not just random images but things more like David Lynch films, with dialogue and plot that escape my rational understanding. It was all about this… AHA! Found it. I don’t want to thread-jack, so remove the link if you like, but I thought it was relevant.
//An intelligent human knows that he/she is unlikely to be right all the time. //
Yup. But you see what it’s like out there with the blabby zealots. It’s truly astonishing. Even just on a personal level, if I meet someone who is always telling stories about how great he is, or how he got the better of someone, or how if everyone just did things HIS way (we all know the type – the Grey’s Anatomy finale had a great character in the emergency room who was like that) – anyway, I know that when I unwittingly find myself in a conversation with someone who is like that, my first response is to desperately find a way to escape. Also, on a deeper level – i have serious doubts about anyone’s brain power who is THAT insistent on his own eternal righteousness. It just seems kinda dumb.
Now inflate that onto a political level and we have some serious issues.
They remind me of those insufferable know-it-alls we all knew in college. You know the type–always lecturing at parties about the “bourgeoisie” or some other crap, dismissive of the “clones,” so admiring of their own righteous wealth of knowledge. They always wanted to tell everyone “how it really is.” As I type this, I am remembering a particular guy I knew in college. He was pontificating(as usual) in the kitchen at one of our parties. I walked in there for a beer or something, listened for 15 seconds, opened my mouth to say something, and my dear friend(still today)Debbie beat me to it–“God, you are an idiot,” she said. I still love her.
By the way, DBW – I feel pretty confident that I can recommend Language of the 3rd Reich to you – just because I know your feelings about totalitarianism, etc.
It’s SO GOOD.
He was a German Jew, living in Dresden with his Aryan wife (his journals have been published as well – AMAZING) – and as the noose tightened around his neck (he was only protected because of his wife) – the only way he could get through it was to make a study AS IT WAS GOING ON of what the Nazis were doing to language, and how the totalitarian mindset was suffused throughout the language.
As a Jew he could not buy newspapers, use the library, etc., so his study was necessarily incomplete, and had to be finished after the war.
He even goes down to analyzing birth and death announcements – to show how deep down this language had gone.
One of his main observations was what the Nazis did to the word “fanatic”. Now of course this is all translated from German – but his point was that through the history of the German language BEFORE the Nazis, “fanatic” always had a negative connotation. He gives multiple examples. But with the advent of the Nazis – the word “fanatic” was everywhere, and they twisted it into a positive.
Death notices: “He fought fanatically on the front …”
“Fanatically committed to the blah blah blah …”
Fanaticism of course implies passion with no reason. This was the whole point. The Nazis wanted to encourage in people a sort of mystical “faith” – critical reasoning suppressed – the Fuhrer supplanting Christ as the savior of the people – a “fanatical faith” in “blood and soil” (again: 2 rather benign words, not sinister in themselves -but which took on HUGELY different – almost opposite – meanings under the Nazis. Same with the word “work”.)
It’s a terrific book – very readable, it’s just very very specific, and you have to be a nut on this stuff to want to read it.
I highly recommend it.
DBW -hahahahahaha about your friend Debbie! That’s pretty much all that needs to be said.
“tonight I will have a hamburger WHILE watching some porn!”
Red, in the interest of having a shared celebration of our inalienable rights, I believe I’ll invoke a similar plan for tonight.
Let freedom ring!
Oh – and incredibly: Klemperer and his wife survived the fire in Dresden which was how they escaped – they only had their papers, and they fled the city and remained in hiding for the rest of the war – in kindly people’s barns, etc. But Klemperer notices, even at the very very end of the war, when all was lost – that the Nazi language persisted – even in those who helped them.
It’s a kind of brainwashing and conditioning – you use language THIS way.
A sudden thought occurs to me while reading the thread: should we just enroll the Nazi mindset retroactively into the Super Adventure Club? I know the old Internet rule, “The first one to call someone else a Nazi loses the argument,” but in this case we really ARE talking about Nazis! And the whole idea of controlling language to forestall debate or critical thought is a hallmark of both.
Nightfly – absoLUTEly. There is a totalitarian system right in our midst. I think that, for me, is one of the main fascinations – how they wrestle and control language – because when you control language you control THOUGHT.
I truly believe this. That’s why writers are always among the first attacked in any totalitarian takeover. Get rid of those WRITERS … who want to write their own way!!
I believe it was Eric Fromm who quoted a German friend as saying, sometime in the 30s: “We Germans are so happy. We are free of freedom.”
Also, an interesting analysis of the totalitarian mindset from Aldous Huxley:
“In the field of politics the equivalent of a theorem is a perfectly disciplined army; of a sonnet or picture, a police state under a dictatorship. The Marxist calls himself scientific and to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology. Both are justified in their pretensions; for each applies to human situations the procedures which have proved effective in the laboratory and the ivory tower. They simplify, they abstract, they eliminate all that, for their purposes, is irrelevant and ignore whatever they choose to regard an inessential; they impose a style, they compel the facts to verify a favorite hypothesis, they consign to the waste paper basket all that, to their mind, falls short of perfection…the dream of Order begets tyranny, the dream of Beauty, monsters and violence.”
Sheila–I remember you posting about this book before, and I thought it sounded like something that would interest me, but, you know, I never got around to it. This time I will seek it out. BTW, I can hear my wife now when she sees the book, “Oh, Lord, here we go.” And you are correct, the control and shaping of language is one of the most important strategies of tyranny and totalitarianism. If they can control and shape language, they can contour thought. What is particularly eye-opening is when we realize we are all very susceptible to subtle changes to the meanings and usage of our language. Pro-choice, compassionate conservatism, fanatic(which I used more-or-less positively in my first comment), the on-going effort to redefine “lying” as stating incorrect information that many thought was correct, Ebonics, etc. are all examples of people using language in an attempt to shape thought. There are millions of examples of this kind of thing.
David Foster – that is an incredible quote. What is it from? An essay of his?
I especially liked this:
“to this claim the Fascist adds another: he is the poet–the scientific poet–of a new mythology.”
DBW – I think you will SO dig it. I had to order it online, couldn’t find it in any bookstores. Although the bookstore I went to in Belfast had multiple copies, which is really interesting, if you think about it.
The enraging book The Language POlice spells out this whole language-control thing in such detail that I literally threw the book across the room at one point.
You can see examples from both sides of the political spectrum (which is what Diane Ravitch was getting at – that right-wing groups and left-wing groups are basically hand-in-hand fascists in terms of controlling language). One example is what the Christian Right has done to the word “values” and “family” – They have co-opted those words – turned them into symbols meaning something else, or something that they feel they want to OWN. Only THEY know what the word “values” really means.
Now if you use the word “values” as just a normal word without all the loaded meaning behind it – you have to deal with the distortion placed upon it from that one group.
Funny, too – Klemperer has an entire chapter on how the Nazis consistently used “inverted commas” in their language. Man, is that so applicable today!! I find some bloggers, and some newspapers, actually, virtually unreadable because they “cannot” get through even “one” sentence without “showing” their “contempt” for certain “concepts” without putting “quotation marks” around every “other” word.
To me, this tendency shows a serious deterioration in intellect. Look at how some bloggers write about gay marriage. Always gotta put the scare quotes around marriage!! Just to show their contempt for the entire concept!! Or – on the flip side – words like freedom, or democracy … gotta put the scare quotes around those words, to show that those concepts are up for debate, are somehow … unreal. That’s what the scare quotes do. They render something, a concept, a reality, an idea – UNREAL.
Nazis did this like gangbusters – which I did not know – but Klemperer’s whole chapter on that REALLY resonated for me.
Oh, yes, the contemptuous quotation marks. As if “democracy” was some complete abstraction that none can agree has real meaning. In my experience, the current political climate has created legions of people who speak with these types of derogatory quotation marks around about every sixth word. All they lack is the two-handed sign language for “quote-unquote.” A pox on all of them.
OK, last thing on this subject. I particularly loathe those who throw around words like Fascist, Nazi, brownshirts, etc. in a manner that indicates a complete ignorance of the historical horror those terms represent. Just because someone disagrees with you, it most assuredly does not mean they are a Nazi. I can be moved to urges of physical violence by such idiocy. When every imagined indignity shoots immediately to comparisons to Hitler, where do we go when the real horrors begin? To what do we then compare such actions? By stripping fascism and Nazism,etc. of their true historical significance and depth of meaning, we steal dignity and honor from those who were subjected to the abominations these words accurately describe.
Sheila…the Huxley quote is from his novel “Ape and Essence”..well worth reading.
This quote is one of the few things I’ve seen that really picks up on the aesthetic element in Fascism.
The Tracy Flick reference put me in the mind of a quote from, I think it’s Daniel Webster:
“They mean to govern well, but they mean to govern.”
DBW –
There is a certain conservative Christian female blogger who is virtually unreadable because of this quote thing. I mean, I find her unreadable anyway for various reasons having to do with, oh, her theocracy-loving viewpoint on life and politics – her wish to impose her religious beliefs on everyone in this country …
But even more than that, her overuse of quotation marks around words shows the level of her intellectual degradation. Nothing is real to her unless she agrees with it – and so every other word has those marks around it – to show her comtempt. For the word, the concept, the very fact that certain IDEAS exist in the world offends her theocratic right-wing sensibility.
So she ‘must’ show that ‘nothing’ is really “true” unless her “beloved” Bible tells her “so”.
But sometimes it gets truly weird over there – like I can’t figure out WHY certain words are put in quote marks – like – what?? Trying to pierce into the fog of her thought process is nearly impossible – because the deal is: when you have a habit of putting quotation marks around everything, it reveals the ultimate confusion you, as a person, have about REALITY.
So yes – horrible writing, just in terms of technique – but again – like Klemperer points out – how you write reveals how you think.
So even though her views are, in my mind, anti-American, totalitarian-adoring, and not well thought out at all – I read her so I can watch how people like her think. I need to know how my enemy thinks. Even if they can’t write for shit.
David Foster – thanks, I haven’t read it – but based on that one excerpt I think I have to!
I wasn’t wacky about Brave New World, believe it or not. I thought it was boring. I know, I know, blasphemy. But I don’t remember any prose in Brave New World as compelling as that!
I wasn’t crazy about Brave New World, either. “Ape and Essence” is something quite different.
Hitchens will say anything you want about “the left” if it keeps him in victory gin, and the right has a lot more gin money these days. But I’ve never seen the word “Orwellian” used in this way you describe, could you provide an example?
Crouton –
Read Hitchens’ book. Tons of examples there. And if you buy it – you’ll keep him in gin money! Always a good thing.
Also, crouton, along with one of the themes in this here comment thread: I find it interesting that you put the words “the left” in quotation marks and do NOT put quotation marks around “the right”.
So lemme guess: you’re left-leaning?
:)
David Foster – I will totally search out that book – thank you!
Crouton’s use of the quotation marks in context of this thread was indeed really funny.
Steve – heh heh. I know!! :)
I’m tellin’ ya – stuff like that is a dead giveaway of how you think! People don’t even realize they’re doing it. But once you start to see it – you see it EVERYWHERE.
Or maybe I should say ‘everywhere’ just to show my own ironic distance from the concept of everywhere-ness.
I “see” this sort of “thing” everywhere, too! So, let us see how we can “exploit” this “quotation mark” for our own “financial gain.” We will copyright the “quotation mark” and charge people “money” for its use. We could make – a million dollars!
Well, maybe “a million dollars.”
Well, it was funnier in Dr. Evil Voice. =P
Uhm – don’t you mean Dr. “Evil”?
Actually, I meant “funnier.”
Hey, Sheila, might you possibly disclose the name of the virtually unreadable female conservative Christian blogger? I feel like I’m missing a few good laughs if I don’t get to see her abuse some punctuation.
Ha. No, no, now I will not name names.
I prefer to remain stealthy so that I can observe my enemy undetected. At least for now.
Eureka. I’d only heard of her once before and forgotten the name, but I remembered the blog on which I saw her mentioned and remembered some context to search by. (The post actually involved her being torn apart by right-wing bloggers.)
I went and took a look at her blog. It’s the first time I can remember reading something and scanning it only for material in quotation marks. I did in fact roar with laughter. Most of it was probably funny just because I was looking for it, though, and would have only been annoying otherwise. My favorite:
Also, unrelated to her, but related to quotation marks humor, are you familiar with the Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks?
(Nightfly oughta appreciate it as well.)
wow – you found her!
hahaha – see what I mean? It’s epidemic over there.
And this from the first post on her page right now:
Uhm – what? What is with the quote marks there?? I mean, it becomes like a game: hmmm, why is “job” in quote marks? What is in her mind that makes her want to do that?
I mean, I get it – I guess she’s saying “It’s not really my JOB – I’m not getting PAID for it – so TECHNICALLY it’s not my JOB …” but ew – horrible.
It’s not just bad writing – it shows her muddy thinking.
Oh Steve – that link!!! hahahahaha I am already in love with it!
The Misused Quotations are “killing” me!
Now, on to the “blog” you mentioned.
Well… I confess to difficulty in finding it. I knew it wasn’t any of the ones I normally visit, due to the lack of horrid writing on my favorite sites. I’ll try again later.
OH damn – I shouldn’t have said anything. I really don’t want to make this about one particular person – because then it gets all personal, and I just don’t really want to do that.
It’s just that she was a great example for that quote thing … so I thought I’d mention it.
Ack. Awkwardness.
I know the liberal media (oops – almost put quotes around that!! haha) doesn’t have a good track record with this stuff either – you know – “freedom” and “terrorism”, etc. I totally accept that, and I see it EVERYWHERE.
But oh boy, the conservatives do it too – not WSJ so much, although they are guilty of it as well – but all of ’em.
Bad writing does not belong to the liberal media. Contemptuous quotation marks do not belong to liberals. They belong to anyone who is a black-or-white fanatical person – a zealot – who cannot see any but their side.
Here is what I was taught in high school writing:
Only put quotes around stuff that is a direct quote from someone else. Don’t attitudinize words by putting qutoes around them.
If I write the word freedom with quote marks around it – I am telling you how I FEEL about the word. That’s inappropriate and it’s bad writing. High school English.
But if I ask someone, “What is the most important thing to you?” and they say “Freedom” – then I can put it in quotes and have my conscience be clear.
Now I am certainly not without sin here. If I say about a movie I saw that there was a lot of “acting” in it – I’m telling you the acting sucked. You can feel my contempt.
“So Mischa Barton was, you know, ‘acting’ …”
So I’m not perfect. It’s something I work on in my writing, most definitely. It’s probably why I’m so attuned to it.
Sheila – don’t feel bad. First of all, the URL hath eluded me. Second of all, I know it’s not personal. I may well wind up agreeing with some of the positions while laughing myself silly at the syntax. One of the funniest things I ever saw was a college buddy of mine doing an impression of my stream-of-consciousness patter, down to my born-to-hand-jive Italian gesturing.
I’ve tried reading Hitchens’ book, both with and without gin, and I don’t think his examples of the misappropriation of Orwell are very useful at all.
I just went back and re-read “Orwell and the the Left.” Besides convincing myself that his examples fail to demonstrate a systematic pattern of ill will, bad faith, or intellectual confusion among Orwell’s liberal critics, I was really annoyed by Hitchens’ punctuation and orthography in general. Are readers of this forum aware that Hitchens uses cryptic quote marks very liberally indeed? Now that I’m sensitized to them, I see them everywhere in this book–much like his haphazard and promiscuous montage of parentheses and long dashes! At least he desists from the device of capitalization as an expression of emphasis–THANK GOD!
Anyway, I’m still not convinced of the existence of any well known critical thread imputing support for totalitarianism to Orwell.
Bacon bits:
Are you dissing me for my habit of capitalization? Just because we disagree? What is your problem?This is your first comment on my site and that’s what you say?
I said I wasn’t perfect and I truly work at being a good and a better writer. I enjoy my capitalization habit, I think it’s funny and emphatic – it actually reads the way I talk, but it annoys a lot of people.
So you know what? If it annoys you so much? Don’t read me. Very simple.
While I agree that it is less artful writing to use quotation marks around words that aren’t actually direct quotations and will tend to especially hurt professional writing, such style is or isn’t a problem to a widely varying extent in stuff such as blogs, dependent on the words in the quotes and the intended meaning.
For instance, I think the Mischa Barton example is a totally different deal than some of the earlier examples. Contempt-quotes play a more useful role in some cases than others. In
the implication is that while side B is really the right, side A isn’t really the left.
In
or
there’s no meaning added by the quotation marks that wouldn’t be conveyed more smoothly without them.
On the other hand, using the contempt-quotes with Mischa Barton’s “acting” is reasonable because it conveys that what she’s doing is only some poor imitation of acting and not the thing itself. While there may be more elegant ways to convey that, this achieves the purpose concisely and effectively. (And, obviously, conciseness is not among my own virtues.)
Basically, I think use of contempt-quotes in casual discussion as on a blog such as this is acceptable to the extent that the user could persuasively defend their reasons for it if asked.
Also, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that wasn’t actually the first comment on your site from Mr. or Ms. Bacon Bits. Notice the comment above from someone named Crouton.
If on any of your earlier or later posts, there are quarrelsome comments from Iceberg Lettuce or Shredded Carrots, be suspicious.
Steve – hahahahahahahaha you crack me up!
Steve – and I do think you make some very good points about the quotation marks.
My writing is meant to be subjective, emotional, and funny. I’m not trying to be a serious reporter or anything. Christian lady IS. The NY Times is. I don’t trust a news source that is imposing its editorial opinion into a news story by putting quote marks around words like terrorist. Nope. You lose credibility with me when you do that.
Someone who blows themself up on a bus is a terrorist. You can skip the scare quotes, please!!
Also: if you overdo anything you lose your effectiveness. A couple of well-placed quote marks could make a good point – but too many? You look like a jackass.
I probably overdo capitalization. I still think it’s funny. And I’m not changing it for Mr. bacon rinds up there.