“The Super Bowl: when the advertising industry takes all of our black, empty yearning and spins it into dreams! Finding that sweet spot of consumer desire that can only be accessed by the right balance of poop jokes and misogyny.”
The Most Interesting Man in the World.
It devalues actual work.
“The word ‘troll’ is thrown around a lot these days, and personally I find it a little too dignified for the people it describes. Trolls sometimes guard bridges, which seems like honest work. I much prefer the term ‘clown-goblin’ to describe people who put forth intentionally inflammatory views just to get a reaction. This kind of contrarian takes a scorched earth approach, spraying contempt for everything in every direction.”
Turns out that many grammarians who rail against the passive voice don’t really know what the passive voice is! Even better, some folks who have railed against the passive voice, including George Orwell and E.B. White, have used the passive voice while doing so …
“The recent glut of art volumes devoted to Soviet architecture may be surprising to anyone who previously thought ‘Soviet architecture’ had about as much to do with ‘art’ as ‘Soviet leaders’ had to do with ‘glamour.’ Yet here is a whole bookshelf to contradict that view.”
“When a person advocates radical change on the order of eliminating one of the three macronutrient groups from our diets, the burden of proof should be enormous. Everything you know is not wrong.”
“What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves. Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?”