I post this for three reasons. First, I have a deep appreciation for language. Second, it mentions a common quote misattribution, and I recently corrected a quote attribution for which I had long been crediting the wrong individual. Third, it tickles my fancy.
Every time a post or comment on Language Log mentions, in any context, the prescriptive disapproval of preposition stranding (where a preposition is separated from its logically associated complement, as in What are you looking at?), e.g. in this post, we get commenters (who, incidentally, seem never to have read the site before) tussling with each other to be the first to inscribe two routinized types of comment.
One type says “I think a preposition is a fine thing to end a sentence with!”, or words very much to that effect (unaware that instances of this lame “look-I’m-violating-the-rule” joke have been going on since at least the 1700s). The other type says, “This is nonsense up with which I shall not put!” (invariably thinking that they are quoting Sir Winston Churchill, though Ben Zimmer definitively refuted that misattribution years ago in a post that Mark and I subsequently included in our book, and it is enormously annoying to us that still no one is aware of Ben’s discovery).
Unable to bear any longer the tedious work of seeking out all the instances of these two comment types so I can delete them, I have decided that from now on I will hunt down the relevant commenters and kill them.
I realize that it is unusual for a popular science blog to launch upon a policy of killing its own readers. That is why I thought an explicit warning should go up on the site first. This is that warning.
Quacking Christopher Maloney has tried to say my paper that was largely about him was hate mail, but I feel he does the term a disservice. I don’t have a personal grudge against the guy and since hate mail is all about the personal (not to mention the, uh, whole mail thing), it was not hate mail he received. As I’ve told him before: Chris, I don’t hate you. I hate woo.
I mention the infamous quack because, though tiresome as he is, he helps to illuminate a point I wish to make. Hate mail is something significant. In order to get it, someone has to really get under someone else’s skin. There has to be a true, seething, crashing vitriol behind it if we’re to honestly call it hate mail. Provided there isn’t a bag-o-crazy behind the veil, I’m forced to view hate mail as a badge of honor. Sadly, I’ve never received any. I’ve been left to wallow in the intellectually and morally and legally bankrupt threats of libel lawsuits (and a surprising number of times, really), occasionally peppered with whining from Andreas Moritz supporters/cancer promoters. Perhaps I need to come out in favor of seal clubbing; something drastic is needed. Until then, I watch with envy this clip of Dawkins:
I’ve always found it ironic that some of the worst looking and most difficult to navigate websites are ones run by places that offer to train students in website design and the like.
For the Sake of Science 