Having suffered Bill Murchison's breezy, empty newspaper editorials as a Dallas resident many years ago, enjoyed reading this Firedoglake takedown comparing him to Dr. Smith from the old Lost in Space TV show--for the use of self-satisfied alliterations, among other irritants ("Come along, you bubble-headed booby").
Murchison has written an article about how he prefers good writing to bad writing. He starts this article with a first sentence that he seems quite proud of, something Classic along the lines of “Call me Ishmael” or similar. Unfortunately it reads rather more like “Ishmael is the call-me I go by, old bean!” Or something:
Can’t stand to watch the English language’s losing encounter with the culture of who-cares-anyway?
To which the most common answer would probably be, “what the hell does that mean?” A more sensible answer would be, “fuck you and stop bothering me,” because that would not encourage Murchison to explain himself. Which he does, painfully and at length. His point, such as it is, is that he disagrees with a professor who wrote a book arguing that, in his paraphrase, “English, like a turbulent stream, is dynamic: always refreshing itself with new modes and models and images.” He takes exception.
So what about all this, then? Has Lynch got us dogmatic dinosaurs dead to rights? Not quite, I think. English is dynamic. Still, we can’t let the matter drop just there. The notion of language as a bulletin board for faddists needs no new friends. I fear it has too many already.
Dear Lord, someone gave Dr. Smith a Townhall column. This is a bubbling brew of barbarous bullshit, a craptastic collection of vertiginous verbiage!
Before the internet you were a captive audience for local media monopolies and their pet intellectuals--Firedoglake doesn't emphasize enough that Murchison isn't just "a wingnut" but a decades-long columnist for the Dallas Morning News.
