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Aug. 26th, 2011 12:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretParagraph in Hal's voice, from the Infinite Jest fic I feel increasingly despairing of ever finishing. Hal's voice is intoxicating. I can see why, even though I haven't really liked the Infinite Jest fic we've seen from Yuletide all that much, people keep trying to do Hal's voice. I personally am not writing the fic in Hal's voice, but I'm writing some footnotes in his voice.
Now, like, the thing you need to understand is that basically the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts didn't have a coherent grammatic system that they could all agree upon. They could agree on topics like singular they and rally around that cause for a while but it would transpire that their seemingly organized, focused, protest agenda would dissolve into an endless series of pointless dissections of diagrammed sentences. Fundamentally, that is to say when you really looked at the core of who they were, they were a gang who was dependent on communication, who prided themselves on possessing superior communication skills to anyone else, who thought that their opponents were inferior communicators because their command of the finer subtleties of English grammar was less exact, who believed that communication was so essential to surviving the modern world that they would triumph because they were better at grammar. I mean, the whole idea was to teach their grammatical ideas to children so that they would be better prepared for the adult world. But they didn't realize that because of their obsessiveness, and by obsessiveness I mean in the fully clinical sense of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, these people were diagnosable obsessives, they didn't practice as effective communication as they could have. The great irony of ironies, when you dig deep enough, is that the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts fell apart because of their inability to talk to each other in their shared, oh-so-prized mother tongue of NNE English. Brahmin flavored.
Now, like, the thing you need to understand is that basically the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts didn't have a coherent grammatic system that they could all agree upon. They could agree on topics like singular they and rally around that cause for a while but it would transpire that their seemingly organized, focused, protest agenda would dissolve into an endless series of pointless dissections of diagrammed sentences. Fundamentally, that is to say when you really looked at the core of who they were, they were a gang who was dependent on communication, who prided themselves on possessing superior communication skills to anyone else, who thought that their opponents were inferior communicators because their command of the finer subtleties of English grammar was less exact, who believed that communication was so essential to surviving the modern world that they would triumph because they were better at grammar. I mean, the whole idea was to teach their grammatical ideas to children so that they would be better prepared for the adult world. But they didn't realize that because of their obsessiveness, and by obsessiveness I mean in the fully clinical sense of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, these people were diagnosable obsessives, they didn't practice as effective communication as they could have. The great irony of ironies, when you dig deep enough, is that the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts fell apart because of their inability to talk to each other in their shared, oh-so-prized mother tongue of NNE English. Brahmin flavored.