Old Stuff

Belloc on Blogging

Someone - was it Mr. O'Rama? - recently compared blogging to karaoke: blogging is to professional writing as karaoke is to professional singing. Very true in my case. Anyways, the first bit of this passage from Belloc's The Path to Rome reminded me of my own little blog; I'll quote the whole batch of vitriol since it's so much fun:

My little friend, I know how it is done, and I find it contemptible. People write their articles at full speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty wax - sometimes even they dictate to a typewriter. Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and carefully transpose the split infinitives, and write alternative adjectives, and take words away out of their natural place in the sentence and generally put the Queen's English - yes, the Queen's English - on the rack. And who is a penny the better for it? The silly authors get no real praise, not even in the horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on Sundays. The poor public buys the Marvel and gasps at the cleverness of the writing and despairs, and has to read what it can understand, and is driven back to toshy novels about problems, written by cooks. 'The hungry sheep,' as some one says somewhere, 'look up and are not fed;' and the same poet well describes your pipings as being on wretched straw pipes that are 'scrannel' - a good word.