User talk:Dwbird2
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[edit] List of literary movements
You've contributed in the past to this list. If you're at all interested, I believe the page needs considerable expansion, and I've made a list of suggestions on its talk page. I'd appreciate your input. Thanks. Chick Bowen 23:53, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
- I agree with you that an annotated list is far more useful than anything too discursive. I've tried to streamline it a bit. Chick Bowen 20:03, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Pilot fish, oft, and often, redux.
Regarding your comment over on the anonymous IP's talk page (which I'm guessing was you, hence it coming here):
"Oft" is indeed a word. So are "doughty," "ere," "forsooth," and "rede," but they belong in Sir Walter Scott, not an article about fish. Wikipedia is too full of writers who think that sprinkling their prose with archaic expressions makes it sound sophisticated, when in fact it creates unnecessary ambiguity and clashes with the project's generally encyclopedic tone. Your impeccable good manners in contradicting my edit are an entirely different problem, of course.
And Wikipedia is too full of writers who think that "encyclopedic tone" implies "must pound prose into monochrome, lest someone, somewhere think that Wikipedia was written by people, rather than generated by robots from the Ministry of Garden Varieties".
"Oft" is not "archaic", and neither is the form "many a [singular]" as opposed to "many [plural]" (which you saw fit to change, too). It is neither unacceptable nor a required form; I see no compelling reason to either correct it, or correct to it. I object to a certain breed of Wikipedian that thinks that not reading a certain word in his Superman comics makes it "archaic", for almost exactly the same reason that I object to those that go around Wikipedia "correcting" British spelling to the American kind.
With all that said, I'm sorry about the bad language. That was uncalled for, so I offer an unreserved apology (you could put that down to not sleeping properly for several days, but whatever). Love, Lewis Collard! (baby i'm bad news) 09:30, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
- I will reply to this here, since that's what your user page says to do. First, thanks for the apology. I owe you one too, since the edit summary I left in the first place was obviously liverish, whiny, and calculated to indicate my superiority. Sorry.
- At any rate, I agree that academic prose tends to be pallid and that Wikipedia need not require of its articles the driest of concision. Editors who change British to American spellings or vice versa are just wasting time, since they erroneously believe that one spelling or the other is incorrect, when in fact color and colour are both perfectly acceptable variants. As a North American I tend to use the former, and I imagine that you as a Brit tend to the latter.
- My problem with oft is that oft and often are not "perfectly acceptable variants" of one another, because oft is (if not archaic) at least old-fashioned. The reader is obliged to stop and wonder why it has been chosen, only to conclude that no distinction is being made. I too dislike that breed of Wikipedian that mistakes the English Wikipedia for the Simple English Wikipedia and declares war on "hard words," and I will continue to flatter myself that I do not belong to it. I prefer Joyce to Hemingway, Ganivet to Galdós, and David Foster Wallace to John Updike. (I have also never read a comic book.) But expository prose must take clarity and ease as its highest (though not only) values, and sometimes when I'm reading an article the spirit moves me to clarify or ease its prose. This is subjective, but what isn't?
- Happy editing. Dave1898 16:09, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
- Well said on all counts, really, and I can't argue with you on this. And you know what's the punchline of it all? "Oft" and friends weren't even "word choices" any more than my use of British spelling; it's entirely habit, not rhetorical value, that leads me to use them. Yet, I will defer to your judgment on this; as a man of academia you probably have a much better idea of what is obsolete and what is not. I will try much harder in the future not to let that sort of thing slip into my edits.
- Thanks for coming to the table and being civil. Love, Lewis Collard! (baby i'm bad news) 17:18, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Invite
Jccort (talk) 19:52, 18 March 2008 (UTC)
