Be a person...

[MaggieL]

Originally posted by jaguar

First, just because business is immoral doesn't mean I?m not involved in it, and doesn?t mean I don't have respect for those who do it well, doesn't mean it?s not immoral. I'm insulted you'd think I?d miss something so basic.

So...let's sum up your position as you've laid it out in this thread so far: business is immoral, but when it's "done well" you have respect for those who do it, and you do it yourself, and you would do even more of it except for a selfish purpose of your own: extracting as much as possible from your parents so you can get into a good school toting that shiny new Powerbook you want.

Is that a fair summary?

If you were in a position where you had to depend on your own financial efforts to survive, I'd be more inclined to let it pass when you prate about the selfish immorality of being in business. But probably not a lot more...it just seems more egregiously hypocritical in your current situation.

(By the way, I'm having trouble with the sentence you wrote enumerating which necessities you're paying for and which your parents are still providing for you by *their* "immoral" efforts. Which of those commas is supposed to separate those two categories? How were your readers to know?)

I'm sorry you feel insulted, but my impression of what you're *thinking* has to be derrived completely from what you *say*. If you blow by important issues because you're just such a super-fast thinker that the plodding act of creating language can't keep up, you'll have to forgive me when I'm left thinking you haven't actually *had* the thought.

We only know what you think by the evidence of what you say.

Secondly, as we've said before, Johnson had many review his work before his publish it, and year to write it...

Um...which "we" was it who said that? As I said,*I* don't think Jonson had an editor (he certainly didn't have a spell-checker; he even had to write his own dictionary, as I recall). I don't think he took a year to write it the passage I quoted. I think he probably *did* read what he'd written a few times, and reflected on whether his words conveyed his thoughts well. He might even have gone back and changed a phrase or two; which took a bit more effort with quill and parchment than we expend in this text widget here.

I have MSWord spellchecker and the odd half an hour, my words are not designed to stand the linguistic test of time, they are mere to make a point in a debate here and now.

Isn't this debate worth enough time for your input to be well-constructed and convincing? Maybe your words don't need to survive "the linguistic test of time" on a four-century scale, but they *do* need to pass muster in the debate here, and survive the trip from your mind to your reader's mind (a short but perilous journey), for the reasons described eloquently in the Jonson quote. I'll boil down the quote to "sloppy speech implies sloppy thinking", if it must be sloganized into a sound-bite.

You still haven't made any direct comment on the quote. Do you agree with the sentiment it expresses? Disagree? Can you support your disagreement with an alternative proposition?

I don't have the preprocessing time, sometimes that makes it a little in articulate, and because I think faster than I can type, typos etc come up.

Then maybe you should slow down a little. Thinking faster than you type is of no value if your thinking doesn't show up in your typing.

You don't get credit for having thoughts that aren't expressed, or that are poorly expressed. *Typos* are one thing, but words that bear only a passing resemblence to the words in a dictionary are another. Punctuation and sentence structure that cloud the presentation of your ideas are even worse. But the larger-scale structure that presents an idea and then offers support for it is key. Bluting out a proposition and then asserting that "it's obvious" just won't cut it.

And when you and your Powerbook get into that better Uni, the faculty will insist that your discourse toe that line, too. If they don't, you will have been dissed much severly than anything you've suffered at *my* hands here.