I just stumbled on Robert Burns’s response to a reviewer who criticised his ‘obscure language’. Now bear in mind a lot of Burns’s poetry was written in Scots, he took this slightly personally.
Ellisland, 1791.
Dear Sir:
Thou eunuch of language; thou Englishman, who never was south the Tweed;
thou servile echo of fashionable barbarisms; thou quack, vending the
nostrums of empirical elocution; thou marriage-maker between vowels and
consonants, on the Gretna-green of caprice; thou cobler, botching the
flimsy socks of bombast oratory; thou blacksmith, hammering the rivets
of absurdity; thou butcher, embruing thy hands in the bowels of
orthography; thou arch-heretic in pronunciation; thou pitch-pipe of
affected emphasis; thou carpenter, mortising the awkward joints of
jarring sentences; thou squeaking dissonance of cadence; thou pimp of
gender; thou Lyon Herald to silly etymology; thou antipode of grammar;
thou executioner of construction; thou brood of the speech-distracting
builders of the Tower of Babel; thou lingual confusion worse confounded;
thou scape-gallows from the land of syntax; thou scavenger of mood and
tense; thou murderous accoucheur of infant learning; thou ignis fatuus,
misleading the steps of benighted ignorance; thou pickle-herring in the
puppet-show of nonsense; thou faithful recorder of barbarous idiom;
thou persecutor of syllabication; thou baleful meteor, foretelling and
facilitating the rapid approach of Nox and Erebus.
I have a headcanon that Hermione insists her children attend some primary muggle schooling before Hogwarts, just as she had done. Now, imagine Arthur Weasley attending his grandchild’s science fair, being the ultra proud grandfather….and yet also completely geeking out over absolutely EVERYTHING.
Canon
“That is a volcano, that is a VERY SMALL VOLCANO, how – young lady, how did you make this? Baking soda and food coloring? MARVELOUS!”
I remember years ago, when I created my first blog on here, I had an interaction with someone that completely changed how I view people on this website.
I saw a post floating around in book blogs that was about the treatment of books, mostly how people treat them well, and they were generally talking down to people that treat their books poorly. I made some polite, “I don’t know, I think damaged books are a little romantic,” kind of response and elaborated on that a little. The intent was to put it on my blog. I wasn’t aware the OP and the person I reblogged the post from would get notified.
Some girl, I think the OP, went on a multi-paragraph rant about how my opinion was bullshit and how I should’ve stayed out of the conversation if I felt the way that I did. There was nothing polite about her response.
At that point, I had a Tumblr blog for two days.
I deleted that blog less than a week later and didn’t return to this site for another year or so. I haven’t made a book blog or interacted with the book side of Tumblr since, despite the fact that I love books and reading.
That is constantly in my mind when I speak with other users on this website. One negative interaction can completely ruin someone’s joy on this site, or any website, really. It doesn’t take much. That’s why I strive to only post positive content, fandom content with little to no discourse, and I make an effort to be polite to everyone on here. I never want users to feel the way I did in that interaction, especially new ones.
If I have problems with someone, I report and/or block them. Trolls and purposely rude/crass/demeaning people are included in that. There’s been a few exceptions, in particular trolls, but for the most part, I’ve been really keen on creating and keeping a positive, accepting environment that anyone is welcome in, so long as they’re respectful to others. That’s gotten me in trouble in the past, admittedly, but I’d rather be accepting to a fault than make others feel like the scum of the earth just for a sharing an opinion that doesn’t hurt anyone else.
Same here.
I agree and relate so much. Today, I was thinking of how every person I’ve interacted with feels like a scar in my mind, because I keep such vivid memories of them (even the pleasant memories feel like scars). I often recall online conversations, things that happened and didn’t go well, drama, how I’ve had to leave a number of communities because people were being so heated and hostile to anything they didn’t 100% agree with. How people were so prone to protect the established big posters, without any quality control.
I’m not always best at social interactions, but I always try to be as nice and open-minded as I can. I know I’ve been harsh in my opinions before, I know I’ve annoyed people without even realizing, and I really hope to avoid doing those mistakes again as much as I can. I’ve had dark days and I also know that sometimes, fandom is what carries you through the hours.
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