The Amateur Blogger Meme

Dorian at Scrutinies is examining what drives amateurs to blog, and has started a new meme:  So You Don't Want To Be A Professional Blogger:

I’d like to know – if you blog for other reasons versus blogging intentionally to build a platform for your writing/your apostolate/your cat – and I am not saying that it’s bad to try to boost blog traffic: 

1. If that’s not your primary focus, what enjoyment do you derive from blogging? 

2. Do you consider yourself to be a “successful” blogger? In what sense? 

3. If you could choose between having a post shared 500 times, or having one of your Internet Idols send you an email to say “I really enjoyed your post,” which would you choose?

My cat did stun a bat the other day, so mad props to her, but I don't think we can monetize that.

1. We blog because we like to hear ourselves talk. DarwinCatholic is our journal, our magazine, our outlet, and our 1920s Party. Also, it's the perfect method of procrastination.

More importantly, we blog because we like to hear you talk. We keep writing not only because it's an outlet for our thoughts, but because we put such value on the conversations that arise from various posts. Some of our most delightful friendships have sprung from blog interactions, and one of the things that keeps us writing is the desire to preserve and strengthen those friendships.

2. Sure, by our own lights. We've been writing for seven years and have gained a fair amount of proficiency in pounding out verbiage regularly. We have the best commenters in the blogosphere. What's not to love?

3. I'd rather get an email, from anyone. High traffic (not the same as having one's post shared 500 times, but often related) is not a good to be wished unless it produces quality discussion. I have no desire to wade through trolls and abusive commenters, or fight the same endless combox battles, or wrangle with those who are Wrong On The Internet. Dear intelligent eloquent civilized readers, we value you more than you know.

Now here's a question that Dorian didn't pose, but which seems an obvious follow-up: Would we ever blog professionally? (This is purely academic, since no one has offered to pay us for writing.) For myself, I find it unlikely. I like the freedom of answering to no one and writing on no one's schedule. I'm happy not to have editorial oversight. I don't want to have to tailor my posts to specific external audiences. Also, from the way some of the larger portals structure their pay systems, I doubt we'd ever actually see any money out of it, so there's that.

Really, I just don't want anyone telling me I can't post Lonely Island videos.



I'm not part of your system! I'm an adult!

Happy Belated Birthday to Us!

In our grand Darwinian tradition of being late to everything, we failed to notice that our seven-year blog-iversary was last month. So, seven years and forty days since Darwin wrote his kick-off post, we'd like to thank our dear readers for sticking around. Every time we bat around the idea of shutting the blog down, whether from over-work (Darwin) or sheer sloth (me), we consider the good friends we've made over the years through blogging, and decide to keep the place open a bit longer.

To our many internet friends: God bless you. You're often in our thoughts and prayers.

Greatest Hits

As Blogger forces me, at last, into it's "upgraded" interface, I find myself poking around at some of the newer features that I'd never used before. One of these is the expanded stats page which, among other things, allows you to see which of your posts have received the most visits during a period of time, or for the life of the stats database (which is back to May '09).

Looking at our own top-ten provides a few obvious choices, but also some quirky ones that show what Google has liked on DarwinCatholic over the years, or perhaps even how we've been useful to people. So, here's the Top Ten list for DarwinCatholic:

1) How Far Can We Go? -- MrsDarwin's review of Brett Salkeld & Leah Perrault's book on chastity and dating was picked up by several of the major portals and has had four times as many visitors as the next runner up.

2) How to Marry a Nice Girl -- the most recent post on the list, driven by link-back from the manosphere

3) African Rift Likely to Form New Ocean -- A quick science news post from the summer of 2010 which has drawn 2300+ visits thanks to Google.

4) Income Inequality: 1945 Edition -- I really have no idea why this wonkish dive into the finances of the characters in The Best Years of Our Lives has drawn so many readers in the last couple months, though it is certainly a worthwhile movie to watch.

5) A Frank Breech of Trust, revisited -- MrsDarwin's discussion of having a breech baby turned at 37 weeks has consistently drawn Google visitors over the years

6) The Vatican's Rifles -- The traffic drawn by this discussion of the only battle rifle ever commissioned specifically for the papal army demonstrates that if you write about something quirky enough, you can be an expert.

7) Poverty and Abortion: A New Analysis -- I was always pleased by this statistical analysis, and it seems Google is as well.

8) The Unmanly Bitterness of the Manosphere -- Argue with heavily traffic websites, end up with traffic.

9) Real Sex vs. the Contraceptive Mentality (Part 1) -- I'm not sure why it's specifically the first of this four parter that gets the most hits, but it was some writing I remain quite proud of.

10) The Magical Mystery Glock -- My discussion of the myths surrounding the Glock handgun also seems to be a persistent Google draw, and that makes two gun posts in the top ten, which isn't bad. Why no alcohol posts?

The Quintessential Pie Fight

Years ago, before the advent of the internet and search engines and Youtube, one might see a movie once and never stumble upon it again, which meant that certain scenes, remembered as they were viewed in the first flush of hysteria, achieved a crystalline status as the funniest thing ever.

Do such memories live up to the harsh reality of re-viewing? Not often. And yet, just last night I found a cinematic moment that has haunted me for two decades, and it was everything I remembered, and more:



"You simply must try my pies!"

It also struck me that there was a passing rememblance here to the past weeks of blog conversation at DarwinCatholic.

But Will it Play in Peoria?

So. Let's blog. We'll start with a generality. Funny thing about the internet: it fosters connections between people who might never have met otherwise, but it's no substitute for the in-person interactions these friends eventually crave. Now let's work in a personal anecdote: Last October, when Darwin and I were riding down to New Orleans with Betty Duffy to hang out at the Walker Percy Symposium with The Korrectiv gang, we had to ride on the spare all the way from Indy to Nashville because we couldn't get anyone out to the Duffy homestead to repair a flat tire (just inspected the day before!) at 5 am. In Nashville we spent a congenial hour with Jordana while Betty's car was attended to. Turns out nothing was actually wrong with the tire, but if it hadn't chosen to act up that morning, we would have missed connecting with an online friend.

Are you tired of the meta-blogging yet? I am, but the mechanics of writing a blog post are on my mind because I'm off this weekend to Peoria, famously middle-American territory, to attend the Behold Conference and to sit in on the Meet the Bloggers session on Friday night. "New Media" is a hot topic these days. Everyone, it seems, wants to write the next big blog, and I am here with my big bad seven years of blogging experience to share the secrets of blogging success (not mine, but someone's) with you.

Write well about interesting things. Often.

Meet the new media, same as the old media. No matter what pretty templates the aspirational blogger uses or how riddled a page is with bullet points, one will not attract or maintain faithful readership (large or small) without being able to meet these criteria. No amount of highlighting or money quotes in bold font will compensate for poor writing, or a dull topic, or for a posting schedule so sporadic that readers stop tracking after a while (though Google Reader may take care of that, but since I don't use Reader we'll call that point irrelevant to our discussion).

Now Behold is a Catholic women's conference, and my feelings on "lady conferences" have been eloquently summarized by Betty Duffy, but in this case it's Betty I'm going to see.  She and Sarah Reinhard and I are carpooling out to Peoria, where the big draw is not the conference, though I'm sure it's very nice, but the chance to hang out once again with Jennifer Fulwiler and Hallie Lord. Those ladies have come a long way from when the three of us used to visit each other's living rooms in Texas and resolutely ignore the antic screams of our combined children: Hallie has just edited a book called Style, Sex, and Substance: 10 Catholic Women Consider the Things that Really Matter, and Jennifer and Betty are two of those ten women. And the reason I'm making the midwinter trek to Illinois is that people I know but don't get to see often (or people I'm meeting for the first time in person, such as Jamie who invited me to come in the first place) are taking the same journey. The internet giveth friendships and it sustains them long-distance, but nothing beats sneaking out of a talk so that Duffy can take a cigarette break while the girls pass the flask down the line and exchange erudite and profane banter.

That's my blogging cue to embed a YouTube video exemplifying erudite and profane banter:



This did not play in Peoria.

Here's my last blogging tip for the New Media crew: know when to stop writing. When you look at the clock and it's almost 1 am, that's a pretty good sign you ought to pack it in.

UPDATE: Registration for the Behold Conference has been extended to Friday morning, so it's not too late to sign up and attend.

Why We Write

I feel like we keep it pretty real around here. Neither Darwin nor I has an internet persona; we write as we are. We've been around for six years, and long-time readers have a pretty good grasp of our personalities, enough so that any time we've met internet friends in person we've hit it off instantly. On a lark, I pulled up Darwin's first post on the blog, and reads much like something we would write now, albeit we're no longer under thirty and have more than two children now.

So I was surprised by a recent commenter's suggestion that posting something was "out of character". If I've posted it, it's in my character to do so, n'est pas? We've always treated the blog as a self-published magazine, and fill it with articles about what interests us at the moment. We have no overarching agenda, whether political, evangelical, or cultural, and we write to please ourselves. As a result, almost no topic is off-limits, and very few filters apply. We are as we post.

However, because we blog candidly doesn't mean that the topics don't shift over time. Darwin, to give an example, used to write extensively on evolution, but that subject has been covered here; the discussions have been had several times, the same objections answered over and over again. Time to move on. As I scanned the past several months' worth of posts to see what impression we might make on a new reader, I realized that a) Darwin does most of the heavy lifting, anymore, because I'm too lazy to sit down and pound out a post most of the time (ask him how many times recently I've said, "I should write about that," and then didn't get around to it), and b) all the fun personal stuff has migrated off to Facebook, where people know us well enough that they ought to expect quotes from Tropic Thunder, and incessant kid anecdotes, and dumb homeschooling failure complaints, and articles about beer for breakfast and Youtube videos of hip-hop economists and rapping tea aficionados, and pleas for someone to buy my dad's house (again).

And that's a loss. Because although we do discuss everything we write about (that's why I don't have to read Darwin's stuff about money theory, RL: I hear about it enough in person), that's not all we talk about, not by a long shot. We also sit around at nights yakking about why The Horse And His Boy should be made with Bollywood stars playing the Calormenes, and the boy down the street who was trying to hit our power lines with a garden hoe, and how even in my dreams Darwin manifests a mastery of markets and pricing strategies, and whether men who follow game theory are pimping mac daddies or just lame, and occasionally laughing ourselves stupid over Samuel L. Jackson declaring, "That's it! I have HAD it with these motherf---ing snakes on a motherf---ing plane!" We don't always have to share it, but don't be surprised if we do.

Spamalot! Or Not

Do you know, after six years of being on Blogger, I've only just now realized that there's a spam filter for comments? Yes, there is, and it answers the question that had been bugging me in a low-level way: why certain good comments which showed up in our email are mysteriously missing from the blog. I note this with particular apologies to Kevin J Jones, who several months back commented with a most fascinating link about modern misandrists which I would have liked to discuss with everyone at the time, and Brandon, several of whose comments (including the "trolleyology" reference) were stuck in spam for no discernible reason.

And this is why we flirt, every now and then, with the idea of switching to Wordpress. Anyone have any recommendations or cautions on the alternate blogging platforms?

Blogoversary

It hardly seems like it, but the Darwins have been inhabiting the blogsphere for five years now. It doesn't seem like that long, though as I re-read our first post, I realize that we had only two children then -- though looking back I realize miss #3 was, as the saying goes, a gleam in her father's eye right around then. And here we are expecting our fifth to be born within the next few weeks.

I also remember, looking over the first month, that it took a while to get used to thinking in terms of blog posts. I'd find myself struggling for topics, whereas these days topics are no problem, but I struggle for time.

Still, three of those June 2005 posts remain among those I recall as my better ones, and am surprised to realize were written so long ago:

Population & Ideology

Send me your poor...

Your child's disabled?

I think at least once a year since starting I've toyed seriously with dropping blogging, as it's something that's hard to do half-way. It becomes a mentality after a while, with thoughts and observations always coming in the form of post ideas. However, the interaction itself is rather addictive. And I would certainly recommend to anyone with an interesting in writing the habit of writing for public consumption on a near daily basis.

Not just that, but there is a sense in which the virtual world becomes a real community over time. Indeed, some of our close friends locally are people we originally ran into via the blog. And it also allows distant friends to keep tabs on us.

So here's to five years, and I'm sure there will be many more. It's good to know you.

No more Chicken Soup for the Blog Soul

A friend recently lent me Words in a French Life, a book assembled from a collection of blog posts -- a variety of literature that is burgeoning in these days of the internet. The author had been committed to writing every day about a different French word while exploring her life as an expat in France, raising children who were more proficient in the vernacular than herself. And I enjoyed it, in general: dredging up my college French to translate the phrases sprinkled throughout, learning new words, and looking at life in a different country. But writing every day must take its toll -- a few of the columns seemed a bit forced. There I would be, reading a perfectly good account, only to be thrown out entirely by a last inspirational sentence tacked on to bring the thing to a neat close.

I can't blame the author for this, exactly -- it seems to be endemic in blog writing particularly. I've grown very wary of the pretty conclusion, the spiritual lesson learned, the great insight gained through the grind of daily life. I know why writers use this trick, and I've done it myself -- hard up for something, anything, to post, I remember this little anecdote that could just do for posting if I can put some little inspirational twist on it. And people seem to eat the stuff up, so it must be fine, right?

Of course people draw inspirational conclusions from daily life all the time. What I find tiresome is the... craftedness of it all. Of course good writing must be crafted, not just flung at the page, but it takes a particular talent to draw inspiration from the ordinary while not seeming gimmicky or easy. Pentimento strikes me as an example of that kind of exemplary writer who can at all times maintain both honesty and real style in her writing at all times.

I don't even want inspiration from the internet anymore. I've been trying to immerse myself in Scripture, reading passages from the Wisdom literature each night. This is real. This is what can reach into my soul and open me to God in a way that reading a blog can never emulate. Who can say anything that Qoheleth didn't cover 23 centuries ago?

And that's fine. I like reading funny stories about people's kids, with no moral tacked on. I like musings on the political situation (to a point). And I love good, true writing -- not flashy, not gimmicky, not designed to lift me up or force a life lesson or "make me think". Bloggers can do the writing and I'll do my own thinking, without a serving of Chicken Soup for the internet soul.

Newman Fisks it Here

I've been reading John Henry Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua for a book club. The Apologia is Newman's account of the development of his religious beliefs, culminating with his conversion to Catholicism, written in response to a charge of mendacity by the hot-headed Charles Kingsley. I've only been able to get as far, so far, as the Newman/Kingsley correspondence, and while reading it I was thinking of what someone in my club had mentioned: how like a blog exchange this is. Kingsley's ill-considered, intemperate rant is exactly the sort of thing one might read online (minus the elevated language and complex grammatical structure), and Newman demolishes him in the comments box. But what caused me to laugh out loud, and made several other mothers waiting outside dance class glance at me oddly, was Newman's fine fisk of Kingsley's "apology", in which Newman gives a side-by-side comparison of what Kingsley says, and what the British reading public will take him to mean. I suddenly imagined a Fr. Z-style fisking, with the emphases in black and the comments in red.

VI

The Rev. Charles Kingsley to Dr. Newman

Reverend Sir, Eversley Rectory, January 14, 1864.

I have the honour to acknowledge your answer to my letter. I have also seen your letter to Mr. X. Y. On neither of them shall I make any comment, save to say, that, if you fancy that I have attacked you because you were, as you please to term it, " down," you do me a great injustice; and also, that the suspicion expressed in the latter part of your letter to Mr. X.Y., is needless.

The course, which you demand of me, is the only course fit for a gentleman; and, as the tone of your letters (even more than their language) make me feel, to my very deep pleasure, that my opinion of the meaning of your words was a mistaken one, I shall send at once to Macmillan's Magazine the few lines which I inclose.

You say, that you will consider my letters as public. You have every right to do so.

I remain, Reverend Sir,

yours faithfully, (Signed) Charles KINGSLEY

VII

[This will appear in the next number]

To the Editor of Macmillan's Magazine

Sir,

In your last number I made certain allegations against the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Newman, which were founded on a sermon of his, entitled "Wisdom and Innocence," (the sermon will be fully described, as to¹ ... )

[ I Here follows a word or half-word which neither I nor any one else to whom I have shown the MS, can decipher.

I have at p. 23 filled in for Mr. Kingsley what I understood him to mean by " fully.", -J.H.N. ]

Dr. Newman has, by letter, expressed in the strongest terms, his denial of the meaning which I have put upon his words. No man knows the use of words better than Dr. Newman; no man, therefore, has a better right to define what he does, or does not, mean by them.

It only remains, therefore, for me to express my hearty regret at having so seriously mistaken him; and my hearty pleasure at finding him on the side of Truth, in this, or any other, matter.

(Signed) CHARLES KINGSLEY

VIII

Dr. Newman to the Rev. Charles Kingsley

The Oratory, January 17, 1864.

Reverend Sir,

Since you do no more than announce to me your intention of inserting in Macmillan ' s Magazine the letter, a copy of which you are so good as to transcribe for me, perhaps I am taking a liberty in making any remarks to you upon it. But then, the very fact of your showing it to me seems to invite criticism; and so sincerely do I wish to bring this painful matter to an immediate settlement, that, at the risk of being officious, I avail myself of your courtesy to express the judgment which I have carefully formed upon it.

I believe it to be your wish to do me such justice as is compatible with your duty of upholding the consistency and quasi-infallibility which is necessary for a periodical publication; and I am far from expecting any thing from you which would be unfair to Messrs. Macmillan and Co. Moreover, I am quite aware, that the reading public, to whom your letter is virtually addressed, cares little for the wording of an explanation, provided it be made aware of the fact that an explanation has been given.

Nevertheless, after giving your letter the benefit of both these considerations, I am sorry to say I feel it my duty to withhold from it the approbation which I fain would bestow.

Its main fault is, that, quite contrary to your intention, it will be understood by the general reader to intimate, that I have been confronted with definite extracts from my works, and have laid before you my own interpretations of them. Such a proceeding I have indeed challenged, but have not been so fortunate as to bring about.

But besides, I gravely disapprove of the letter as a whole.

The grounds of this satisfaction will be best understood by you, if I place in parallel columns its paragraphs, one by one, and what I conceive will be the popular reading of them.

This I proceed to do.

I have the honour to be,

Reverend Sir,

Your obedient Servant,

(Signed) JOHN H. Newman

Mr. Kingsley's Letter Unjust, but too probable, popular rendering of it

Mr. Kingsley's Letter I. Sir,-In your last number I made certain allegations against the teaching of the Rev. Dr. Newman, which were founded on a Sermon of his, entitled " Wisdom and Innocence," preached by him as Vicar of St. Mary's, and published in 1844. 2. Dr. Newman has, by letter, expressed in the strongest terms his denial of the meaning which I have put upon his words. 3. No man knows the use of words better than Dr. Newman; no man, therefore, has a better right to define what he does, or does not, mean by them. 4. It only remains, therefore, for me to express my hearty regret at having so

2. I have set before Dr. Newman, as he challenged me to do, extracts from his writings, and he has affixed to them what he conceives to be their legitimate sense, to the denial of that in which I understood them. 3. He has done this with the skill of a great master of verbal fence, who knows, as well as any man living, how to insinuate a doctrine without committing himself to it. 4. However, while I heartily regret that I have so seriously mistaken the sense

On the more serious side, I was reflecting that many people wail that public discourse has become more debased over the years, yet Kingsley's shrill Know-Nothing-ism rather proves that the haters will always be with us. His expanded set of accusations, What, Then, Does Dr. Newman Mean? don't serve to vindicate him. As I was reading his quotations from Newman's sermon, I found myself nodding in agreement with Newman's interpretations of scripture verses on how to speak the truth.

On Kingsley's accusation of Catholics all being loose with the truth, and the throwing around of the term "Jesuitical" -- I remembered something that a professor of mine had spoken of when we were reading MacBeth. He had some interpretation of the porter's speech that proved that Shakespeare was a closet Catholic which was based around the porter's references to equivocation:

Knock, knock! Who's there, in th’ other devil's name?
Faith, here's an equivocator that could swear in both the
scales against either scale, who committed treason enough
for God's sake, yet could not equivocate to heaven. O,(10)
come in, equivocator.

This was supposed to be a reference to those Catholics who were ambiguous or "equivocal" about their Catholicism when questioned so as to keep undercover during the horrible persecutions of the sixteenth century (the standard execution for a priest was being drawn and quartered, after God knows what other tortures). The Jesuits were especially noted for encouraging this kind of nicety with language, and heck, they still retain that "equivocator" image to this day.

On Meeting Bloggers

As MrsD mentioned, we had the pleasure of dropping in to hobnob with several of our fellow wizards in the blogging world during the recent Darwin family travels. At various points in the Great Ohio Trip we spent time with:

Entropy
Fr. Fox
Jay Anderson
TS
Betty Duffy
Rich Leonardi
Scott Carson

And on previous occasions we've had the pleasure of meeting:

Tito
Blackadder
Jenn
JulieD
The Opinionated Homeschooler
LitChic
The Bettinellis
Cranky Conservative (and the missus)

(My apologies to whoever I have forgotten. It wasn't intentional!)

Even in our increasingly wired culture, there's still a slightly spooky air to the statement, "I'm getting together with someone I met online." Not only does it make it sound like one of you has a greater than average chance of being a serial killer, it has a certain antisocial ring to it, suggesting that one spends most of one's time in a basement, smelling of old socks and lit only by the glow of the monitor. I must admit, I'm rather cautious to admit to non-blogsphere people that I originally met some of my friends and coworkers through blogging. "We knew each other in Catholic circles" tends to be my way of explaining it away.

Yet for all that I am hesitant to admit to seeking out chances to meet those we interact with online, I've found it to be a universally positive experience. Admittedly, the etiquette of meeting for the first time someone one has talked to for years can be a little awkward at first. But modern social relations are nothing if not challenging from a social custom point of view. (How as poor MrsD to navigate the traditional "nice girls don't kiss on the first date" stricture when we were both car-less freshman on the same college campus? Our first "date" was a number of months after we started "going out". But I digress.)

For me, the reason why meeting bloggers is so enjoyable is because one has already been able to find out a great deal about the other person through a less socially threatening medium. I am, by habit, a very cautious conversationalist. For all my online opinionating, I'm very hesitant to bring up politics or religion or indeed my more unusually interests in history, literature and languages with people I don't already have some indication would be interested and congenial. Indeed, I usually stick to discussing with people mostly those things in which they have already stated an interest. This leads to safe and low conflict conversations, but with other people who are equally careful in their discussion habits, it can result in never getting too far into any topic.

However, reading what someone else has written over the course of months or years (and reading their comments on my own writing) provides enough of a layer of familiarity that it seems possible to discuss a wide range of topics without too much fear of either alienating (or boring) the other person, or needlessly exposing myself to disapprobation. In effect, the blogsphere acts as a social sifting mechanism. It allows us to form sub-communities of people with at least a certain level of common interest and acceptance. And this commonality makes much more interesting conversation possible. And it also gives one enough information about the specific person to know of possible shared interests, or areas where one ought not to throw one's elbows around. (So for instance, I know not to issue any smack talk against rap when visiting with Jenn and certainly not to bring along a pet scorpion, lest she feel the necessity of instigating a throw down.)

For all that blogging is often knocked as one of the lower forms of communication, in my more self congratulatory moments, I like to imagine the blogsphere as a sort of modern equivalent to the 18th century coffee house culture. Not only did different coffee houses in the great cities like London and Paris and Vienna have different characters (in some people congregated to discuss business, in others philosophy and politics, in other literature, in others science) but there was a thriving genre of one to two sheet daily papers put out by individual writers or writing teams which were distributed to the coffee houses and served as both reading material and conversation topics. Addison & Steele's The Spectator was one of the early successes in this genre, and Samuel Johnson's The Rambler was a late one, but there were many others -- less successful and less remembered. At one point Boswell writes about his wonder at seeing Johnson dash off an issue of The Rambler in one sitting, longhand, and send it off to the printer without revisions. If only my own unrevised (or even revised) writing could be of such value.

Blogging in the Grudge-o-sphere

In the last four years I've learned a great deal about a host of topics, including my Catholic Faith, while blogging, reading other people's blogs, and participating in comment box discussions. And yet there are some notable dangers that come with blogging as well.

A few months ago, I did myself no great credit in a combox discussion on a friend's post. Someone against whom I carried paper left a comment I disagreed with, and rather than sticking with a basic refutation I went all out: questioned motives, brought up old arguments, put words in his mouth, the works. An hour or two later I got an email from my friend. "Wow. Next time tell us what you really think..."

But I knew I was right. I his reply and was pouring out the reason I'd been 100% justified in behaving that way at 70wpm. A year and a half ago, this other blogger and said such-and-such. And when I'd pointed out his obvious errors, he'd said that. And then there was that other time. And remember when over on that other guy's blog he's said this in the comments? And...

I took a moment to stare at the paragraphs I'd written and realized this would sound a lot more appropriate coming out of my six-year-old as an explanation for why she'd hit another kid than coming out of a thirty-year-old man who fancies himself intellectual.

As bloggers we sometimes live by the word in rather the same way that a duelist lived by the sword. And slights which, when explained to anyone else, would immediately sound small and petty, fester and become long term rivalries.

Given the source of my recent embarrassment, I've tried to make it a rule to think how I would feel writing an explanation of my behavior in any given conversation to a disinterested party. Given my pride, this is a strong incentive to charity, or at least calmness. Naytheless, the temptation remains. I suspect that it is a built in feature (or bug) in an avocation such as blogging.


[Source]