For months I've written long comments, fondly imagining these monsters would demonstrate my interest, would prove I took the recipient’s post seriously. Vain hope. Length risks being misunderstood. It may embarrass those less grandiloquent. The final paras may remain unread.
Not that I favour cyber-short-form. For twenty minutes I had a Facebook account. Terrifying! Like inspecting my own tombstone - faces of the damned inching their way across my screen. While Tweeting is surely for those who would prefer to bark, cheep, howl, miaow, hiss or otherwise imitate animals.
There are people out there who write well and interestingly and I want more from them. Most are polite and have indulged me. But over-stuffing is for turkeys not humans. I devised a formula for an optimum comment:
Lapel-gripping start. Obsequious compliment. Not forgetting the comment author. Changing to a more profitable subject. Ending with self-promotion.
Constructed an example but, dissatisfied, deleted it. Pondered the essence of a comment which is – surely – to respond. But more than: Great post! Your recipe for cupcakes really touched me. I didn’t get past page four of that book. Happy Birthday.
One may always fib but after 1441 posts I’ve forgotten most of them; I could be revealed as a fibber. Fantasy becomes wearing. Ignore the original post and write any old stuff but that’s kind of Olympian. Correct the grammar and “improve” the syntax; hmmm; ask brother Sir Hugh about his reaction to that.
Asking for help is often productive but may be inappropriate; cupcakes, for instance, don’t figure in my life. Quote a poem (and risk being a show-off). TV programmes? Nah!
Stick to long comments? Pro tem? Avoid Latin tags?
Stick with long ones, you're good at it. Schopenhauer said many things - maybe I'm unfamiliar with his maxime nobilis quote?
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely stick to long comments! Don't judge their efficacy or impact by the shorter (or absent) replies from the rest of us. Maybe we ruminating over what you've written, or are dealing with issues that are more demanding or urgent, that can't be ignored. It doesn't make for good conversation, that delightful give and take that is the hallmark of satisfying social intercourse, but it has value, Robbie.
ReplyDelete(And I do answer you, though not always here.)
You might be overthinking this. I love your long comments.
ReplyDeleteI, to, enjoy your comments. Although, perhaps "enjoy" is sometimes the wrong expression.....
ReplyDeleteYou are informative, interesting and often acerbic, but never anodyne. The reason I keep up our blog "relationship".
MikeM: Appreciate that (but, says he, occupying a cliff-edge called Paranoia on one of the Manic Depressive Islands, might that mean I'm bad at the short ones?)
ReplyDeleteAnd how about this? Are people who go large with blogs and associated comment, merely looking to fill holes in their otherwise valueless lives? At my last lesson, during the warm-down of all things V suddenly switched to a complex and unpredictable sequence of minor-key runs with something unspoken in mind. We'd had a good exhilarating lesson that day and I followed her unthinkingly. Ending up high (sonically that is) as usual. But it wasn't "as usual". My previous top for many months had been F and this was F-sharp. I'd love to write about that but it is the driest of minutiae in a distant, enclosed and esentially English life and there is a limited appetite outside for such techno-talk.
You have the bad luck to know what I'm talking about and thus I must outload (Dump? No, it has an unfortunate second meaning) on you.
Schopenhauer I just chucked in and you've caught me on the hop.
Crow: Aren't ruminants cows and such? Equipped with seven bellies so that they may re-savour last Friday's pot-roast for the sixth time. Help! I jest and it is my default state. Pity me. As Henry V says: How ill white hairs become a fool and jester.
Yes you do provide answers and I love that. You have a tidal quality, albeit one that is influenced by Saturn rather than the Moon. But does the moon deserve an initial capital letter? It is after all a subsidiary heavenly body even if that argument would posit spelling Andorra with a lower-case a. Those poor deprived Andorrans although they do offer reduced-price ski passes in winter. Parenthetically "in winter" is tautological and could be excised. Have you the slightest idea what a ski-pass in Vail now costs?
The above is a good example of rambling. A ramble is an undemanding walk with no aim in mind. Should you really be encouraging that sort of thing?
Colette: Cogito ergo sum. That's straightforward enough even if it is a Latin tag and I should be cutting down on those. All very well but how else am I able to prove that leaving school at 15 wasn't a disadvantage?
But overthinking is something else. Do I end up fatter, thinner, more deranged, stupider, gnawing on a DT-shaped bone?
This re-comment is less than 100 words. I'm desperate to have you confess you love the short ones too.
I love the short ones, too. lol
DeleteAvus: You slipped in while I was doing the triple-barrelled re-comment.
ReplyDeleteThen don't use "enjoy", go for exactitude. If like the masochist you enjoy the whip then say so. Tone Deaf is essentially a literary effusion and the present state of England's government is proof that this country regards literary-ness as the equivalent of spitting in church. There's nobody here but us chickens, your reputation will remain unsullied.
The quotes round relationship are ambiguous, hinting perhaps (though there are other functions and interpretations) at a relationship that isn't a relationship. Such coyness is typically English, even more typically Home Counties. You seem to have a single meaning in mind, as if we first met in school and I - the elder - was a prefect authorised to wield a cane. Ambiguity can be used creatively, it is multi-faceted (see William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity) but it can backfire. Handle with care as you would rat poison.
Given you'd already got two adjectives beginning with letter a you missed an alliteration opportunity in your third sentence. They aren't like London buses you know.