Sad lapdog swine calls for email cleanup
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To paraphrase America Online's famous phrase, I've got mail. What this mail teaches me is that technology is a wonderful thing but it is changing people's lives in ways not always great.
Consider how people used to communicate before iPhones, BlackBerrys and laptops. Why, back in the olden days, they wrote letters with pen and ink.
Letter writers would first have to find a suitable quill, which sometimes involved going into the backyard in search of a goose willing to donate a feather. At times, they were unsuccessful, giving rise to the expression "a wild goose chase." (Note to copy desk: check this before putting in paper).
With quill in hand, they would start their letter "My Dear Mr. Somebodyorother," and after a flourish of pretty phrases, would sign themselves, "Your Most Sincere and Obedient Servant, John Q. Citizen Esq."
In signing this way, the social understanding was that the letter writer might not be sincere, was probably not obedient and was almost certainly not a servant.
These quaint manners were a formal hypocrisy meant to make all personal communication civilized. A man or woman might make all sorts of slanders against whole classes of people but would conduct personal communications on a higher plane of sincere insincerity.
By and large, the formality worked and everybody was happy, except the goose. It took the invention of the fountain pen, the ballpoint pen and later the typewriter to please the poultry community. With these new tools, the dignified formality of letter writing became less stylized, yet something of the old manners survived.
Even today, if you receive a typed letter in the mail from a mortgage company concerned about your lack of payments, it will be addressed to "Dear ..." and it will probably be signed "Sincerely" -- although you are not really dear to the letter writer, who is sincere only about wanting your money.
But with the advent of electronic communication, all niceties have pretty much vanished. As I've got mail, let me go through my email letter box from last week to give you a sense of this brave new world of communications.
Forget "Dear Mr. Henry." In the body of the text, I was addressed in the following terms:
Foe of the First Amendment; child with a crayon; quaint 1950s throwback; thumb sucker; intellectually bankrupt disgrace to all that is American; lapdog; complete disgrace to fellow humanity; discredit to the profession of journalism; shill for the New World Order; dinosaur; crackpot old fool; peon; pawn; dumb uninformed sheep; sycophantic elitist; Mr. Pravda; swine; knuckle dragger; sad old man who believes what the government tells him; sheeple; dim-witted ignoramus; close-minded sociopath; sad, pathetic pile; Mr. Nobody; and dear little zio-poodle. Well, OK, I guess someone did call me "dear."
First Published May 11, 2011 12:00 am
