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Originally Posted by ApK
Anti-intellectual? If this were a classical music forum, that might be a fair criticism. Here, that analogy wasn't intellectual. At best it was likely to be missed by a large segment of your audience, which is poor for both rhetoric and humor, and at worst it was pompous snobbery.
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Give it a rest, ApK. The tone of the conversation was already degraded by your ad populum appeals to the Common Man. It's not being redeemed by your continuous insistence that, if you don't get my jokes, the Common Man is lost.
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Among the merits of fiction are supposed to be enjoyment and relatabilty to the reader. You appear to be discounting that.
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You appear to be discounting the idea that you are not "the reader" but rather
a reader.
None of us can claim to be "the reader" in some absolute sense. Every writer has an ideal reader, but some writers make a conscious decision not to write for the imaginary public. Normative Readers didn't exist for Joyce and they don't exist for me. As a professional musician, I've had to make concessions. As a writer, I do not.
The act of writing has to be fun for
me, not you. If you don't like it, you're free not to read it.
You speak of factoring in enjoyment when reading posts, yet I find most of the writing on a given internet forum to be so abysmal as to be demoralizing, which is one reason I often stop reading or responding to it. For it to be merely unentertaining would be a godsend.
The difference between you, ApK, and me is this: I would never single out some friendly well-intentioned member to chastise them for their style of self-expression. I wouldn't do so if I knew precisely what they were saying, let alone if I weren't sure. That isn't how people should be treated.
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And another thing, while "Show of hands" was really just rhetorical, like "Is it just me....?" I'd have happily acknowledged responses along the lines of "It's just you, we all got it."
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Good to know that you can be tolerant if the answer is phrased just so.