Since Sweet wants to criticize the writing of others, let's take a look at the masterful prose found in his latest harangue.
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I Am a Genius wrote:
"Yeah, good use of grammar and syntax here. What are you, monkey number #239 on that works of Shakespeare project? "My experience at college" or "my college experience" would trip off the tongue better, but, yeah, nice going, Slick."
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What Sweet is ineptly attempting to criticize is neither grammar nor syntax. What he is criticizing is either style or -- in the case of replacing
of with
at -- diction, a style and a diction that he does not like because they are not his own. Saying "I would have written it differently" is not a legitimate criticism. And someone with a B.A. in English should know the difference between grammar, syntax, diction and style. It's odd that he doesn't.
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Mr. IQ of 138 wrote:
"If I'm misreading the signals that bad, assknocker, y'know what, maybe you're pretty damn lousy at giving them, you ever stop to consider that? "
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Nice run-on sentence. And
bad should be
badly. Egregious blunders like these get marked up in middle school. Not what we expect to see from a towering intellect of Sweet's Brobdingnagian stature.
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The Greatest Writer of Our Time wrote:
"I encountered a lot of girls during my three years at A-State who, quite frankly, were as ubiquitous as furniture-- moved about from room to room to be used, like a desk or a chair, and not really given a second thought."
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If we remove most of the gassy swelling -- a trademark of Sweet's prose -- from the first part of this sentence, it says: "I encountered many girls who were as ubiquitous as furniture." It is clear that he does not know the meaning of the word
ubiquitous. "Many girls that I know" cannot be "present everywhere at the same time." Whenever he trots out what his kinfolk doubtless refer to as "them thar big ol' college words," he frequently misuses them. Yet he feels free to criticize the error-free prose of others.
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The Giant Brain of Blytheville wrote:
"But this is getting long by half . . ."
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The word
too is conspicuously missing in front of
long. Another example of Sweet's inability to handle idiom, as if one were needed. And even if the
too is added, the sentence is remarkably awkward.
Here, the word
only is misplaced in a sentence that would present no problem for most native speakers of English. "I only" at the beginning of a sentence is always going to be read initially as "I alone and no one else." When the reader realizes that this reading is a mistake, they will read it as either "I merely had to leave early" or "I had to leave early but there were no other consequences." Not until the reader gets to the end of the sentence and stops to puzzle out the writer's intention does the meaning become clear. An educated person determined to preserve Sweet's diction would have written, "I had to leave early only because I was too real to suit them." English majors are supposed to know this before they get to college.
We won't even get into the frequent punctuation errors in his badly written, badly reasoned and badly conceived screed. If he ever intends to become a legitimately published author, it's long past time for him to turn off the children's cartoons and devote his time to mastering Edited American English, something he somehow managed to avoid accomplishing during his time at college. When he's finished with that chore, he'll want to fill in the vast gaps that are obvious in his knowledge of basic science, history, politics, geography, linguistics, religion, philosophy (with an emphasis on logic), psychology and, well, pretty much everything. He is about 0.5 percent as smart as he thinks he is. He is about 0.5 percent as talented as he thinks he is.
