Re: Which book sounds most compelling?

On Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:46:34 +1300, zeborah@xxxxxxxxx (Zeborah) wrote:

Jonathan L Cunningham <spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

There is no doubt that
Brian is very knowledgeable about language and perhaps, to a lesser
extent, this is true to many others reading rasfc, yourself included.

That should be "true of many others" - it was a typo.

B.A.(Hons) linguistics, at your service. (IOW, that was an incredibly
patronising thing to say.)

Not intended to be patronising, and I can't see why it is: I am accusing
you, and others, of being very knowledgeable about language but
(possibly) to a lesser extent than Brian.

If you are more knowledgeable than Brian, you have not (as far as I'm
concerned) demonstrated it here. But I allowed for that with my
"perhaps".

If you think I'm being patronising to someone else, I'm not sure who it
is.

There may be people here who know a lot more than Brian; if so, they
have not demonstrated it by posting. I think it indisputable that Brian
makes more informed posts about etymology, grammar, punctuation etc.
than any other single individual on this group.

There are other people who, as far as I am able to judge, appear to be
very knowledgeable about other topics, including some specialised and
unusual ones. It's part of the attraction of this ng. I can't see how
stating that can be patronising either.

I'm not replying to the rest of your post because It appears to me that
you are accusing me of things I didn't say, and taking umbrage at them,
or otherwise pointing out the obvious in a way I could choose to find
patronising, were I looking for a conflict.

The only salient point - that you believe the particular book in
question to be in the same style as the three sentence summary - you had
made earlier, and I had acknowledged.

I privately reserved judgement about that but, as you already had
pointed out, I don't have enough information to have an informed
opinion, so I didn't say so. But I would have liked to discuss how that
could be: we might have had a discussion about whether a summary /could/
be in the *same* style, or could only be *indicative* of a style,
because a book and a summary are too different. But, alas, you preferred
to harangue me.

So I don't believe a response to other specific points in your post
would be useful, to either of us or to third parties who might read the
ensuing discussion.

Jonathan

--
"If common sense were a reliable guide, we wouldn't need
science in the first place." Amanda Gefter, New Scientist.
.

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