Sorry to be picky

After too little sleep and waking up at 3 to practice French in hopes it would put me to sleep I crawled back in bed to a very busy mind. It led to the children’s book Millions of Cats and my thought for some time that “We are the meteor” and then it was too late. I had to start writing a column for next week’s Reader.

So I wanted one of the old I hope out of copywrite images from the book and did an image search. That led me to a website called “Literary Hub” which had a brief but helpful post on the book by Wanda Gag. I learned some details that may or may not get into my column such as the book was published in 1928 the year my cat loving Mother and (like Wanda” a fellow artist was born.

I think one of my principal posts yesterday was all about my blog. Well, I don’t accept comments on my blog. I disabled that funcion in weeks back in 2006 because I realized I’d have the unwanted task of standing under Niagara Falls attempting to drink all the water. Maybe modern trolling on the Internet is the heart of all our current political disfunction.

After several replies to the Post’s author about their fond memories of the book came this post which was 100% accurate about the posts first sentence in which ever was mistakenly typed “every” making it a confusing sentence until you got to the end and realized the author’s easy mistake.

I cringed and enjoyed the long string of jibes that followed of which I’m including the first four in a literary cream pie fight:

Sonja Luchini (Author’s real name – good for her)
1. Sorry to be picky, but please – a literary site with an article about literature should at least have someone edit before posting instead of depending on spellcheck. “I don’t know if art is every really finished” should be “I don’t know if art is ever really finished”. It was difficult to read the rest of the article after hitting the first typo bump.

Reply • 3 years ago
nuwandathegreat to Sonja Luchini
I am willing to bet you are a blast a parties. If a typo makes it difficult to read the rest of an article, you have bigger problems than the typo.

Reply • 3 years ago
BRW to nuwandathegreat
Why is there always someone willing to go behind a comment and tear on it? Blast at parties? Bigger problems?? She said sorry to be picky. Troll.

Reply • 3 years ago
nuwandathegreat to BRW
BRW, do you understand irony? You complain about someone going behind a comment and tearing on it as you go behind a comment a tear on it. No offense, but you are a dolt. Per your qualifications, since I prefaced criticism with a soothing comment, there is no reason to complain.

There were another ten getting in on the action until a “Mr. Pepitos” simply wrote LOL

I would never write anything if I thought my mistakes….real ones not just typos….diminished me in readers eyes. I enjoy sneering at Donald Trump’s twitter mistakes as much as any democracy lover but its what’s behind his objectives not his typos that I try to focus on. I have several different levels of care in my output.

A conversation…..punctuation is of no consequence, there is no spelling and retractions come and go quickly and without much fuss.

B. My short blog posts….. Usually on short posts I give them a quick read to fix obvious errors like ever to every.

C. My long blog posts…..I sometimes carefully edit when I think I have something important to say. But Not necessarily. If I’ve cranked out a thousand words or heaven forbid a couple thousand words I was running a marathon……Editing it would be a follow up marathon. Sometimes after one marathon I have life to go on living. And just maybe cranking out a couple thousand words was my way of letting off steam instead of going out buying a gun and causing mayhem.

I’m sure the fact I shut of my replies has saved me many unkind cuts for typos even as it has also deprived me of smart, thoughtful replies like I used to love reading in the Andrew Sullivan Blog back in the 2000nds. I did send Andrew a couple emails pointing out typos but I would never have posted criticism of them on his discussion and reply forum.

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