Re: a bed of nails

Sundeep Dougal (holden@giasdl01.vsnl.net.in)
Thu, 29 Jan 1998 01:50:23 +0500 (GMT+0500) 

About the recent brouhaha over spellings and such, I thought you guys
would enjoy parts of a letter I had occasion to write to a magazine
recently here (all _italics_ mine): 
 
	"Sir,
 
	"Congratulations on identifying yourselves as 'India's most
	_existing_ weekly news magazine.' 
 
	"Also, thanks for being so disarmingly honest as to admit 
        to having 'broken a number of _stores_' and that your 'journalists 
        report and analyze quickly and incisively, _laboriously_.'" 
 
Honestly, I haven't made it up: their web site, _actually_ had these, and
other, _typos_. Yeah, obviously, spelling or syntactical errors can be
misleading, irritating and so on. But, to come back to JDS, and what we
seem to know about his views on the subject on a purely top-of-the-mind
basis. Doesn't CITR have a line about people who pick up just enough
education to hate people who say, "It's a secret between he and I"?
Doesn't Holden confuse between, _inter alia_,"lie" and "lay"?  Or even
Franny (when she can barely hear herself think): 
 
  "So if I spell anything wrong kindly have the kindness to overlook
  it. Incidentally I've taken your advice and resorted to the
  dictionary a lot recently, so if it cramps my style your to blame"
 
Come on, I don't think any of us think any less of Franny because of
her faulty punctuation or even obvious errors like writing "your" for
"you're" and so on. Which is not to say, I hasten to add, that the
above, in any way, is worth emulating, encouraging, or, indeed, a
summing up of the "Salinger View on Spellings". But it does give us a
perspective, I should imagine.
 
Personally, when it comes to letters to, or from, friends and family, I
enjoy the written-from the heart letters more rather than the slickly
polished and proof-read laser prints that one gets nowadays. Nothing
like a good, old-fashioned frentically, almost-frenziedly scribbled
letter, replete with abandonded, scratched-over words and phrases. (I
realise that this is just the kind of windbaggery and indulging in
confessionals about one's likes and dislikes that could prompt a
response just on these lines [;-)]). 
 
So to put this ramble to a stop, I'd like to add that I couldn't agree
more with _all_ that Tim had to say in his post in response to Scottie.
Maybe we can have this Franny passage as a matter of record for all the
posts sent to the list?
 
Kindly have the kindness to overlook all my syntactical and spelling
errors,
 
Sonny


P.S: Catching up on past few weeks mail, incidentally, I enjoyed Helena's
post about Malcs' rare "it's" and "its"  confusion. 

S.