Articulating In The Debates; The Proper And The Improper.

Or, alternatively, throw away your copy of Strunk and White, because it's a terrible "manual of style", is wrong in nearly every instance, and serves more to confuse writers than to clarify grammar.

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The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it....After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

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This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents. Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less...

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...What concerns me is that the bias against the passive is being retailed by a pair of authors so grammatically clueless that they don't know what is a passive construction and what isn't. Of the four pairs of examples offered to show readers what to avoid and how to correct it, a staggering three out of the four are mistaken diagnoses. "At dawn the crowing of a rooster could be heard" is correctly identified as a passive clause, but the other three are all errors:

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"There were a great number of dead leaves lying on the ground" has no sign of the passive in it anywhere.

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"It was not long before she was very sorry that she had said what she had" also contains nothing that is even reminiscent of the passive construction.

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"The reason that he left college was that his health became impaired" is presumably fingered as passive because of "impaired," but that's a mistake. It's an adjective here. "Become" doesn't allow a following passive clause. (Notice, for example, that "A new edition became issued by the publishers" is not grammatical.)

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50 Years of Stupid Grammar AdviceDon't rely on Strunk and White for grammatical advice. Don't rely on it for its banal and vapid style advice, either.Potentially you could rely on it as a doorstop, or to press flowers, but that's about it.Edited by crashfrog, : No reason given.

Hooah is clear. You're usually not.You have a pendulous and tiresome writing style suggestive of someone trying to afford ten-dollar words on a five-dollar budget. That is not "articulation". You are not articulate.I mean you spent six paragraphs gesturing around your point, when you could simply have said "Hooah, please don't swear so much." Being articulate means choosing words carefully - yes, even profane ones - to quickly express your meaning. Your word choices result in a lack of clarity. Sorry, Buz. Nobody's offended by Hooah's use of the word "fuck" in all its glorious conjugations. What offends us is the bald and naked racism you frequently display, for instance most recently in Message 114 of Golden Age of Blah Blah.

If the word "fuck" is good enough for a century of men and women in the armed services who have risked life and limb in defense of our nation and its freedoms, then it's good enough to trip off my tongue and more than good enough for your poor unsullied ears.It's called "adult language", Buz, because only the deeply immature complain about having to hear it. Words do not and cannot offend, Buz. Ideas offend, like the idea that the employers we suffer to do business in our public squares have some innate right to discriminate on the basis of race, sex, religion, or sexual orientation.

The two of you are being completely ridiculous. I've long followed documentaries about the armed services in Iraq and Afghanistan - documentaries that, when rendered airable on broadcast television, sound like Morse Code. Profanity is simply a way of life among the nation's warriors, and contrary to the two of you there's ample evidence that it always has been. My dad was a US Marine, from two generations of Marines before him at least; great-grandpa fought in WWII and grandpa saw action in the Korean War. My dad enlisted during Vietnam but the conflict ended before he could be shipped over (as a second lieutenant, no less.)All of these men could swear the air blue in front of them, as the need arose. I envy their ability to express themselves with a torrent of profanity. I'm not saying my dad swore in church or to little children.But we're not in church or talking to little children. Buz is a 70 (80? 90?) year old man. Purpledawn, I'd guess 40 is a long way behind you. And the notion that the nation's veterans are shrinking violets who can't bear to hear a dirty word at times is, frankly, offensive. The notion that a man as old as Buz is put in the position about complaining about profanity speaks to a profound immaturity and childishness on his part, as well as yours, Purple.

Swearing is very much the norm on the internet, and young kids are not present in any capacity. No more than every single movie has to be marketed as though young children will go and see it. Yes, some parents will bring their young children to R-rated movies. But that doesn't imply that all communication must proceed from the context of what's appropriate for young children.You're asking people to censor themselves. If Percy wants profanity to be against the rules, he can put in rules to that effect. It'd be easy enough to code the board to reject messages with profanity or otherwise obscure dirty words.And, so far, rather than getting complaints from these supposed "young children" who supposedly frequent EvC Forum about dirty words they don't want to hear, we're just getting complaints from a bunch of oldsters on their supposed behalf. When it actually emerges as a genuine issue that young children are feinting dead away at the very sight of the word "fuck", and not simply a bunch of old people clutching their pearls about how kids these days are so rude, then we can talk about what levels of self-censorship are appropriate.

It's not a "public forum." It's an internet forum. You and Buz deciding to act like children doesn't create a "situation" where I feel obligated not to use dirty words, lest you retire to your feinting couch. Just because you decide to act childish, doesn't mean that the rest of us have to follow suit. If you find adult language not to your liking, I'm sure there's a forum where you can talk about last night's Murder, She Wrote completely free of objectionable language. Yes, I think my point, which perhaps you have grasped at last, is that it is unreasonable to demand someone "adjust" - self-censor - just because someone asks for profanity not to be used.

Apparently the difference is how many oldsters I have to listen complain about it. Characterizations of your actions, by definition, can't be personal attacks. You can't simply hide behind the mantle of "personal attack!" any time someone tells you they don't like the consequences of your arguments or makes one you don't appreciate. This is just a further attempt at censorship on your part. I'm sorry you've decided to act that way, but nobody is forcing you to. And other members, including myself, have made it clear that they would prefer to continue to use profanity.That puts us all at loggerheads, I'm afraid. But for some reason you seem to believe that Buz's preference should win out, but the only reason you have for that belief is that Buz's preference is one that you share. Insisting that your preferences are the only ones that matter is the definition of being childish.

No.The point of the debate is to convince. As a speech act, convincing someone - not necessarily your opponent - is a process that necessitates both facts and emotion. The conceit that we can all somehow be Spock and operate on the level of a logic that transcends and is not affected by emotion is a false one. I can't take a position that I think is correct without also feeling that it is correct. I can't tell you you're wrong without also feeling like you're wrong.The notion that human rationality is a process where logical clarity competes with muddling, base emotions is an idea that has been discredited for 30 years. We now know that the process of human cognition is one where rationality and emotion work together.You've tried to give examples of the "emotionless" speech you think the debate should engender, but no speech is emotionless. We're human beings! Everything we do is inflected with emotion, and to disqualify someone's debate on the grounds that they've not been sufficiently dispassionate is absurd - people get passionate in proportion to the supporting evidence they believe they have for their position. To disqualify on those grounds is to say "you're so right, you must be wrong."Debate is not just a process where I try to convince you to think I'm right. It's a process where I also have to try to convince you to feel that I'm right. And emotion-charged language is necessarily going to play a role in that, regardless of how Webster's defines "debate."

Do Hooah's opponents somehow lack any agency of their own? Don't they have any responsibility not to get "inflamed"?

No, I think that you've mistaken calls for "emotional detachment" as having validity, instead of as always being a fallacious attempt to poison the well, which is what they are.Anybody who is emotional about any issue - which is everyone, on every issue - is subject to accusations that they're not "emotionally detached" enough. These accusations should never be taken at face value, and I'm disappointed to see that you've fallen for the ruse.I mean even your source admits that he can't maintain emotional detachment, that nobody is truly capable of it. How reasonable is it, purple, for you to expect debaters to cleave to a perfectly impossible standard? And why would the proponents of "emotional detachment" want people to do something they know is impossible? How can that possibly be taken in good faith? Clearly, it's a ruse. Well, it's quite simple. Humans are herd animals. The Milgram experiment proves that most people will determine right or wrong based on cues from the people around them. If I make you feel that I really feel like I'm right, my conviction - as evidenced by my passion, which is evidenced by my word choices - will be one more thing that eventually adds up to convincing you. And everybody understands that's a rule honored only in the breach. I mean, especially these days. Coming back was a bit of a shock because of the marked decline in administrator activity in regards to personal attacks. It is what it is, but maybe you had to be away during The Purge to see the dramatic difference in the tenor of the board simply due to the nonenforcement of rule 10. You're right. Writers have to decide on their own how much profanity to use. That's always been the case.They don't need you to decide it on their behalf. It helps sell the point. That's the purpose of profanity.

Certainly not by faulting others for not achieving the impossible.

The accusations I referred to. The accusations made against women advocating for the right to choose, for instance, by pro-life men who insist they're the only ones with the distance to approach the issue objectively since the issue doesn't affect them. "Emotional detachment" is when you're supposed to be utterly without emotional reaction no matter how the issue is of practical importance to you personally, but it's ok if I display the emotions of callousness, disinterest, glibness, or skepticism.It's a ruse. It's a way to poison the well. No, I feel it's unwise to refuse to countenance intentionally insulting someone in a written forum or using profanity. No, I directly answered your question. You asked how profanity can be persuasive, and I answered. Profanity can be persuasive because profanity indicates the extent to which I believe in my position. I never said that we "take cues from those who are similar to us." That's not what I said at all. I don't believe that I said that I did or didn't like it, did I? Because you keep on deciding for other people when they should or shouldn't use profanity. There's nothing implied about it - you keep deciding for other people when they should or shouldn't use profanity, when in fact that's something only they can decide. They don't need you to decide for them. It's precisely by that explanation that profanity is most likely to sell the point to those who view it as transgressive, because it indicates so much conviction that one must transgress the boundary against profanity to express it. That's a lot of conviction! People who are blase about profanity don't find it startling or convincing. They may not even notice its presence. But people who do find profanity offensive are far more likely to be convinced by it, because to them it indicates a substantial degree of conviction if one must transgress the boundary against profanity to express its extent.

Well, he will or he won't. If he won't, presumably he has his reasons. How much longer does the thread have to be once Purple's said "maybe don't swear so much" and Hooah's said "fuck no"?

The "people around us" and "the people similar to us" are two completely different groups of people who may overlap only by coincidence. Please believe me when I say that if I had meant "people similar to us", I would have said "the people similar to us", not "the people around us", which actually is what I said.Not the same thing. That's important, because it completely undercuts your point about using profanity making someone "different" than another person who doesn't. We take our cues from the people around us. If they're different than us, we still take cues from them. I don't understand how it is that you can ask me "where am I deciding for others when they can use profanty?" and then in the very next sentence you're providing your decision, on Hooah's behalf, about when he can or can't use profanity.You want to know where you're doing it? How about in the text box where you're typing those messages, did you look there? Because that's where it's happening. You mean, do I not swear in front of women? No, I don't "adjust my profanity." I don't live in the 19th century. So if there are alternatives, profanity shouldn't be used? How on Earth could that be your decision to make for anyone else?

Er, now I"m confused. Do you think the Milgram experiment was an experiment about profanity? Do you think I think the Milgram experiment is about profanity? I do not. Do you not understand the context in which it was mentioned? Apparently you do not.Again - Milgram proves that most people base their ideas about what is right and wrong based on cues from the people around them. Do you understand we're engaged in a multi-post discussion? Certainly, if you forget every single post as soon as you write it, you're going to be confused when I refer to things you've previously said. Since I'm replying to your posts, the links to your posts appear at the top and bottom of my posts. And I certainly did quote you throughout my previous reply. That's not what I understand "mixed company" to mean, but very well. I don't hang around children so obviously I don't have the chance to swear around them. I'd certainly use profanity to any other adult, if the situation warranted it. I've been candid throughout, and I thought my position was clear - people need to decide for themselves whether, and which, profanity to use. Information on what? If you want information, look it up. I don't feel any obligation to do your homework. This bears absolutely no relationship to any point I've made in this thread. Attacking you personally would violate forum guidelines. I have no interest in whether or not you meditate and I'm not a proponent of the practice.