Friday, July 25, 2008

'Anger, real steaming fucking anger can make a man verbose.'

As someone who has himself not been immune to rage-fuelled verbosity, I leave you with two fine examples of the genre.

The first is from Giles Coren, whose enraged letter to the Times--after a sub-editor removed an indefinite article from a restaurant review he had written--is a classic.

A sample:

And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed 'a' so that the stress that should have fallen on "nosh" is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you're winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can't you hear? Can't you hear that it is wrong? It's not fucking rocket science. It's fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.

Second, PZ Myers's response to the flood of abuse (and even threats) he received after suggesting that he might 'desecrate' a communion wafer.

Myers has upped the ante, and has now unkindly treated some other objects that some might hold 'sacred':

I didn't want to single out just the cracker, so I nailed it to a few ripped-out pages from the Qur'an and The God Delusion. They are just paper. Nothing must be held sacred. Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet. You are all human beings who must make your way through your life by thinking and learning, and you have the job of advancing humanity's knowledge by winnowing out the errors of past generations and finding deeper understanding of reality. You will not find wisdom in rituals and sacraments and dogma, which build only self-satisfied ignorance, but you can find truth by looking at your world with fresh eyes and a questioning mind.

Here's to the eloquently angry.

Have a nice weekend.

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