"Impactful" was invented by a barely-literate insurance company executive vice president who did not know the difference between "affect" and "effect" and was tired of looking stupid in front of the peons.
We peons all wept for the language of Shakespeare and the rise of the Confederacy of Dunces.
As for me, should be pretty obvious by now, I have no problem looking stupid, which is probably why I never grew up to become an insurance company executive vice president.
Hey speaking of looking stupid, since Andrew Sullivan no longer replies to my emails, I thought I'd recycle my last missive and maybe one of y'all would have better luck at eliciting a response. Because as unkempt and non-insurance-company-executive-vice-presidentish as I might be, I think a raise a serious point -- one that makes Mr. Sullivan very uncomfortable by it's very nature: why shouldn't public media figures suffer tangible, professional consequence when they lie and/or fuck massively up in the execution of their jobs?
Seems kind of hard to reconcile with Mr. Sullivan's sentiment that It is...
"...time we destroyed the archaic, corrupt, bloated, celebrity-marketing industry now known as publishing."
Of course, if Mr. Sullivan were, say, a bricklayer or an insurance company executive vice president, I would never badger him for responses to issues like this. But Mr. Sullivan isn't a bricklayer or an insurance company executive vice president; he makes a living as a public intellectual -- a Conservative public intellectual -- who prides himself on tackling those edgy topics that "Beltway insiders" are too afraid to touch.
Except, of course, for those edgy topics which might directly affect (see what I did there) his Conservative public intellectual credentials.
Anyway, here is my missive, which I sent in regards to Niall Ferguson's latest bedshitting episode...
Subject: You wrote -- "He's right that calls for him to be fired are egregious and over-the-top."
In virtually any other profession, anyone who shit the bed as badly as Mr. Ferguson would be out on his ass by end-of-business.
So congratulations: in creating a special elite carve-out for your friend that exempts him from suffering any tangible consequences for his lies, you have managed to sound more like the typical Tory caricature of a hidebound, protectionist union goon than any actual union member I have dealt with over the years.
Mr. Sullivan's email address is "andrew AT thedailybeast.com".
5 comments:
Thank you for this.
The popular misuse of the word 'impact' in place of the correct word, 'effect,' is a particular pet peeve of mine when it comes to diction.
And again, I thank you.
um.....you have seen he's quoting plagerist Fareed Zakaria today to make a point about one thing or another this Ferguson fellow commented....
I mean, good luck with your jihad, but as you say, there is a club and you just don't belong...
and you obviously have every reason to be proud of that
I thought this was going to be about Sullivan's "Civil War" post today.
You are certainly not a barely-literate insurance company executive vice president, you are a public intellectual.
So it's high time you quit using "it's" as a possessive, OK? (see what I did there?)
Who ARE these people who pay the least bit of at-fucking-tention to what Andrew and Bobo and your other targets for pillorying say? I reckon they're bland, stupid people, the inert masses, the argon gas of the human population. Have you ever had a discussion with a person who cited Brooks or Sullivan? Friedmustache, maybe, because he writes books that sometimes get read. But are there even bloggers who name-check Sullivan, or drop links to his crapola? Other than Glenn Greenwald, who mainly mentions Sullivan as an example of all that is shitty.
For that matter, when I talk to people in the real world, nobody mentions anybody who's in newspapers. Especially not in Canada, where they pay more attention to what's going on in the U.S. than they do in their own boring (but basically decent) country. George Carlin's political rants are referred to more by actual human beings I know than anything in conventional meeja.
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