PHYSICIAN, HEAL THYSELF

Those are some unhappy gorillas, huh?

There's something very satisfying in yanking a chain and discovering later just how much they went sprawling. After Isabellah wrote her expose of the Tattler, I wanted to make sure the message was heard, so I climbed down into the forgotten pit that is the Other section of SI. Let's be honest here, if you want to talk politics, you'd already be in the Government section, or at least Human Rights. There always seems to be some tragic, pathetic room in Other, housing 20 or so of the idiots who can't find their way into a real room. I'd imagine most of them are at the very least semi-functional alcoholics, and listening to them blurble at each other is enough to drive a man to...well, you get the idea.

This room was the last place anyone saw the Tattler alive, and since Tatty seemed to like to convey the cornball antics of this less than mentally competent crew, It was a perfect place to drop a few depth charges and see what came gushing up to the surface. I passed out a few business cards, link to the blog included, and stepped out before E Pluribus Unum could finish propositioning me.

Imagine my utter shock and amazement to find that the Tattler had either witnessed or been told about my excursion into Frick Frack Fuckover. What was even more amusing was that the only real insult the Tattler could find was to insult my writing. Now, I'll admit that this is merely some light comedy, and hardly meant to be The Great American Novel, but the Tattler is certainly in no place to make any disparagement of writing. I've seen better prose on the walls of a kindergarten classroom. I'll just stick with one type of error for today's lesson, but I'd be happy to sit down with Tatty and go over most of the basic rules of grammar, for a nominal fee, of course. Have a look at this:

Frisson, and Karl the epitome of the shiny-balled-needle-dick-bug-fuckers, who suck from the federal tit while believing personal responsibility plays no role in their life were at it again today.

I'm a huge fan of the shotgun approach to comma usage. It really lets people know your pedigree. The bold use of that comma after the first name really fools the reader into believing that you're at least marginally familiar with why commas are used, if not their correct location. And yet, those hopes are dashed when this hurtling locomotive of a sentence suddenly doesn't have a comma after "life", where even a trained chimpanzee could tell one belonged. This really shows that the writer has a lot of pugnacious aggressiveness. "Hey," Tatty is telling the reader, "you want readable sentences? You want punctuation cues? Go fuck yourself, buddy, I ain't doin' any work for ya!" Want more evidence the Tattler doesn't give a shit about good writing?

There are people, who fall on hard times, and as a society we must provide for them, it's our duty as humans, but to carry the load for lay abouts, with no more inclination to better themselves than a dog has to stop licking his own balls is insulting to hard working people providing themselves a living.

Suddenly, in mid-paragraph, we switch to the opposite extreme. We get commas where no sane person could possibly place them. Like a gongsman with a giant mallet, Tatty pounds commas into place at set intervals, ignoring readibility and logic entirely. Oh, except for right after "balls," where a comma is needed but not found.

Now, in many cases, a good writer can ignore, corrupt, and distort rules in the course of crafting a piece of quality writing. But the kinds of flaws you see above, they just turn writing into shapeless slush. Hey, Tatty, heres your stone back, and sorry about your glass house. Maybe you can write more hero worship pieces about Adolf Hitler to make a few bucks. I hear Stormfront might be interested.

JC