response to Sam

[Ronald Butters]

Judging by the continued general quality of the postings, I have not  driven away anybody. But most of the best minds in ADS rarely post, and many of them have indeed been driven away by the junk. As for Popik, I sometimes criticized his postings as excessive, suggesting that he save them up and put several in one e-mail; I also criticized his work when I thought he was especially n nitpicking or might have missed something (which is what scholars do), but I also had a lot of respect for his endeavors, and I said so rspeatedly. Unfortunately, he did not take well to criticism, and went away (not by any means in response to my occasional criticisms alone).

I have never suggested that anyone should go away. My theme has consistently been to request that people not treat the list as if it were a conversation space where anyone could feel free to report any mindless thing that happened to pop into their minds and report on every mistake or strange (to them) turn of phrase that they happen to see in seemingly endless hours of watching TV or listening to public radio.

It is more than a little ironic that Sam suggests that it would be a good idea for me to unplug ADS-L while in the same breath he suggests that I have driven away such luminaries as Popik--and unnamed other sadly lost putatively important contributors--with my very occasional complaints about the volume of nonsense that one must delete every day in order to get at the very occasional interesting bit.

On Nov 10, 2010, at 7:54 PM, Sam Clements wrote:

> ----- 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
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org