This is going to be just what the title says – a rant. I’m pretty sure I have nothing particularly original to say, so please ignore me if you’ve already had your fill of complaints about stupid readers’ comments. However, if you share my irritation over idiot responses to stories and you feel like wallowing in it for a moment, please stay with me.
A little background first: After posting on Literotica since 2007 (under two different names), I’ve only just begun to delete negative comments on my stories. I’ve cancelled two so far. I feel a shade guilty about doing it. I certainly haven’t deleted any comments that are half-way balanced and coherent, even when they’re severely critical. But I’ve finally decided that out-and-out idiots don’t deserve to have their maunderings preserved below my stories.
In general, I’ve been pretty lucky with the quality of the comments I’ve received up to now, and I’m very grateful to almost everybody who’s bothered to post one, but this week I’ve had two that got right up my nose.
The first one criticized a five page story I’d posted because I’d used single inverted commas (‘...’), rather than double ones (“...”), for speech. He - I think it was a ‘he’, though the posting was, of course, anonymous - titled his comment ‘Unreadable’. The criticism of my choice of speech marks was his only point, and I doubt if he’d read the story. After I’d read the comment, I picked up five books at random. The first three (Wyndham Lewis’s ’The Childermass’, Hermann Palsson’s Penguin translation of ‘Laxdaela Saga’, and Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’) all used single inverted commas for speech, as I do. The fourth, ‘The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes’, uses doubles (“...”), and the last one, Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy,’ doesn’t use speech marks at all – he does it all with layout instead. So the commenter was clearly an arrogant, ignorant idiot whose sole intentions were to insult me and to prop up his own unstable ego. I know I should take all that in my stride, but somehow, this time, the combination of ignorance and egotism got to me. So I deleted him.
The other comment I deleted started off by saying my story was ‘extremely boring’. That was OK in so far as it went – I’d have taken it as fair criticism, or at least as a valid response - but then, later in the comment, it emerged that my story was ‘boring’ because I hadn’t met the commenter’s precise personal plot requirements. That is, I hadn’t written the story he really, really, really wanted to read. This reaction seems to be quite widespread – ‘You’ve let me down because your story wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be! Wah! Your writing is worthless!’ Etc.
Of course, the proper response to a comment like that is ’Write your own story, then’ – but I decided to delete him instead – and I felt good doing it.
I recently received a piece of private feedback as well that I think deserves mention. It was, of course, from that prolific commenter ‘Anonymous’, so I couldn’t reply to him - probably ‘him’ again, I think - directly. Here it is, in full:
‘Pleas join the world in use of common items, it will make your stories far better reading. Leave the ism's of local knowledge home and insert world terms. Here is what the world uses and understands:
mum = remain silent/quiet
mummy = dead body for science
spunk = cum, semen,
for sexual orgasm cum, cumming, (not the come or coming versions)’
There’s a positive here, of course: he chose to write to me privately rather than to embarrass me by broadcasting my alleged short-comings to the world as a public comment. Very thoughtful. On the other hand, the note seems massively and unjustifiably condescending - especially given the writer’s obvious inability to compose a fully coherent sentence, and considering his suspect definitions - is a ‘mummy’ really a ‘dead body for science’ ?
This is, of course, an example of the work of the self-appointed language police. I’m British and the idiom I write in is British, but this language fascist (I don’t normally use the word ‘fascist’ but I think it’s fair this time) wants to insist that everybody conform to his own idea of ‘correct’ English. He’s the world and the rest of us are merely quaint locals with funny linguistic ways that are best kept at home. (He’s clearly never met the concept of language variety, but given the overall quality of his note, I’m not surprised.)
(Incidentally, I’m not generally down on people who don’t write well. There’s no law that says everybody must be able to, and different people certainly have different talents. I know that. But I really am down on the kind of ignorant condescension in this fool’s note. )
OK, I’ve done my rant. Thank you if you stayed with me to the end, and no hard feelings if you didn’t. Rant over. Bye for now.
- polynices
A little background first: After posting on Literotica since 2007 (under two different names), I’ve only just begun to delete negative comments on my stories. I’ve cancelled two so far. I feel a shade guilty about doing it. I certainly haven’t deleted any comments that are half-way balanced and coherent, even when they’re severely critical. But I’ve finally decided that out-and-out idiots don’t deserve to have their maunderings preserved below my stories.
In general, I’ve been pretty lucky with the quality of the comments I’ve received up to now, and I’m very grateful to almost everybody who’s bothered to post one, but this week I’ve had two that got right up my nose.
The first one criticized a five page story I’d posted because I’d used single inverted commas (‘...’), rather than double ones (“...”), for speech. He - I think it was a ‘he’, though the posting was, of course, anonymous - titled his comment ‘Unreadable’. The criticism of my choice of speech marks was his only point, and I doubt if he’d read the story. After I’d read the comment, I picked up five books at random. The first three (Wyndham Lewis’s ’The Childermass’, Hermann Palsson’s Penguin translation of ‘Laxdaela Saga’, and Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’) all used single inverted commas for speech, as I do. The fourth, ‘The Penguin Complete Sherlock Holmes’, uses doubles (“...”), and the last one, Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Border Trilogy,’ doesn’t use speech marks at all – he does it all with layout instead. So the commenter was clearly an arrogant, ignorant idiot whose sole intentions were to insult me and to prop up his own unstable ego. I know I should take all that in my stride, but somehow, this time, the combination of ignorance and egotism got to me. So I deleted him.
The other comment I deleted started off by saying my story was ‘extremely boring’. That was OK in so far as it went – I’d have taken it as fair criticism, or at least as a valid response - but then, later in the comment, it emerged that my story was ‘boring’ because I hadn’t met the commenter’s precise personal plot requirements. That is, I hadn’t written the story he really, really, really wanted to read. This reaction seems to be quite widespread – ‘You’ve let me down because your story wasn’t exactly what I wanted it to be! Wah! Your writing is worthless!’ Etc.
Of course, the proper response to a comment like that is ’Write your own story, then’ – but I decided to delete him instead – and I felt good doing it.
I recently received a piece of private feedback as well that I think deserves mention. It was, of course, from that prolific commenter ‘Anonymous’, so I couldn’t reply to him - probably ‘him’ again, I think - directly. Here it is, in full:
‘Pleas join the world in use of common items, it will make your stories far better reading. Leave the ism's of local knowledge home and insert world terms. Here is what the world uses and understands:
mum = remain silent/quiet
mummy = dead body for science
spunk = cum, semen,
for sexual orgasm cum, cumming, (not the come or coming versions)’
There’s a positive here, of course: he chose to write to me privately rather than to embarrass me by broadcasting my alleged short-comings to the world as a public comment. Very thoughtful. On the other hand, the note seems massively and unjustifiably condescending - especially given the writer’s obvious inability to compose a fully coherent sentence, and considering his suspect definitions - is a ‘mummy’ really a ‘dead body for science’ ?
This is, of course, an example of the work of the self-appointed language police. I’m British and the idiom I write in is British, but this language fascist (I don’t normally use the word ‘fascist’ but I think it’s fair this time) wants to insist that everybody conform to his own idea of ‘correct’ English. He’s the world and the rest of us are merely quaint locals with funny linguistic ways that are best kept at home. (He’s clearly never met the concept of language variety, but given the overall quality of his note, I’m not surprised.)
(Incidentally, I’m not generally down on people who don’t write well. There’s no law that says everybody must be able to, and different people certainly have different talents. I know that. But I really am down on the kind of ignorant condescension in this fool’s note. )
OK, I’ve done my rant. Thank you if you stayed with me to the end, and no hard feelings if you didn’t. Rant over. Bye for now.
- polynices
