Of course, I’m not a big fan of Safire’s politics, but his language column in the NY Times Magazine on Sundays used to hold my interest for some portion of the 30 seconds it took me to flip past the stories to the crossword.
And now, this, a weird take on the vocabulary of the Internet that Safire calls “Blargon.”
Ugh.
First of all, just writing this at all smacks of “Golly, gee, let’s see what the kids on Internet are up to these days, I bet they’ve got some neat words for things.”
Second, there are all sorts of goofy inaccuracies and misunderstandings.
Delicious is a verb? Maybe I’ve been traveling in the wrong circles of the blogerati. (Come on Bill, any hack can see that word needs two Gs…)
Perhaps we were supposed to all have a simultaneous blogasm over the way Safire defines a meme as something apparently nonexistent pre-LiveJournal.
Weird, Bill. Just weird.
[tags]Safire, vocabulary, syntax, grammar, blogs, NYT, New York Times, wingnut[/tags]
Comments
3 responses to “William Safire, goofy grammarian”
I’m about as far as you can get from “blogerati” — but I do use del.icio.us as a verb.
Do you think he was merely trolling for linkbacks?
He obviously didn’t fact check, but I think that some people, annoyed with the survey his ‘research staff’ sent them, filled in joke answers.
Heh. The idea of Safire “trolling for linkbacks” is a fun image, yeah, but I think most of the problem is either 1) a lack of respect for an unfamiliar medium, or 2) not enough understanding of the difference between a page on a social networking site (think MySpace) and a blog.