God. People in English are so ignorant and so arrogant. (They should be illegal, I feel, upon reading this.) Useful to remember since I usually long to be in that department, larger, easier to hide in, less dictatorially run than Spanish, usually. Mais elle est dingue, cette conversation...
To be fair, I think half the people in that conversation are not even English professors, but autodidact independent scholars like John Emerson or Rich Puchalsky. Adam Roberts is a science fiction novelist.
Well, OK. But they are officious nitwits. Bad faculty are like this. It is why I always thought I was not smart enough to be a professor -- many professors talked, or most importantly wrote like these people, and I could not see why it was smart, so, I must not be in the know ... ;-)
I was disappointed when you apologized. You were doing exactly what you said: pointing out a basic mistake in the approach to the translation and raising the question of how to rethink the problem. If people feel offended by precision, that's their problem, not yours.
Yes, I shouldn't have apologized. I guess I felt like my comments were unwelcome, and hence I had overestimated the level of discourse that people wanted to use. That was my fault. I misjudged the rules of the game in that case.
Well, the people who were offended could also be accused of "misjudging the rules of the game". Perhaps they weren't even aware of their assumptions about what the unwritten rules until someone broke the rules.
7 comments:
God. People in English are so ignorant and so arrogant. (They should be illegal, I feel, upon reading this.) Useful to remember since I usually long to be in that department, larger, easier to hide in, less dictatorially run than Spanish, usually. Mais elle est dingue, cette conversation...
To be fair, I think half the people in that conversation are not even English professors, but autodidact independent scholars like John Emerson or Rich Puchalsky. Adam Roberts is a science fiction novelist.
Well, OK. But they are officious nitwits. Bad faculty are like this. It is why I always thought I was not smart enough to be a professor -- many professors talked, or most importantly wrote like these people, and I could not see why it was smart, so, I must not be in the know ... ;-)
Agreed.
I was disappointed when you apologized. You were doing exactly what you said: pointing out a basic mistake in the approach to the translation and raising the question of how to rethink the problem. If people feel offended by precision, that's their problem, not yours.
Yes, I shouldn't have apologized. I guess I felt like my comments were unwelcome, and hence I had overestimated the level of discourse that people wanted to use. That was my fault. I misjudged the rules of the game in that case.
Well, the people who were offended could also be accused of "misjudging the rules of the game". Perhaps they weren't even aware of their assumptions about what the unwritten rules until someone broke the rules.
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