RE "Shoot beaver"?

[Sam Clements]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ronald Butters" <ronbutters at AOL.COM>

> Aboout 95% of what gets posted here is just rambling anecdote or comment
> on somebody or other's typographical error or grammatical or lexical
> "mistake," or some regional or social dialectal feature that could be
> found in a dictionary. Or worse, just somebody saying something like, "I
> agree" or "Thanks for that" or "How clever I am, I studied Latin 50 years
> ago." I spend a considerable part of each day just deleting messages
> without opening them: after you have read one entry in a thread, it is
> gnerallyu pretty clear that the rest is not worth bothering with.
>
> I guess this just means that I need to go the way of Roger Shuy, Dennis
> Preston, etc., and sign off from the list. The occasional interesting item
> is increasingly buried in a sea of trivial anecdote. A lot of people seem
> to find the list as it has become is really what they want to do in their
> retirement or  in their cups or whatever. Assuming that my dues in the
> American Dialect Society are not being horribly strained by the cost of
> recording all this junk for posterity in the University of Georgia's
> computer archive, I should just slink away in silence.
>

But, you won't, just as you didn't when your comments drove away posters
such as Barry Popik.  Not that Barry wasn't carrying things to extremes, but
your comments at that time certainly influenced his postings as well as
mine.

Sorry to be such a burden.

Sam Clements

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