Re: Pet Peeves

Subject: Re: Pet Peeves
From: Ned Bedinger <doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com>
To: Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 15 Mar 2007 10:50:55 -0700

Al Geist wrote:
> If you find the terms tacky because of sexual
> innuendo, then that is a personal problem; however, if you find those terms
> tacky because they do not accurately describe what the reader is supposed to
> do or see, then that is something altogether different.


When I was just a lad, learning fly fishing at my Daddy's knee, I
remember being amazed at his immodest instruction to assemble the
tapered lengths of fly rod by inserting the male ferule into the female
ferule. What I still don't know is this: Was my modest reaction to his
uninhibited instruction a hand-me-down virtue from the generations that
went before him, or was it an innate sensibility that afflicts everyone
(with notable exceptions), regardless of indoctrination?


Whatever, I reckon that some people are bound to squirm at instructions
as innocently contrived as "Insert Tab A into Tab B." How odd that this
motif keeps surfacing in how-to instructions, that it causes ambivalence
in chaste readers yet continues to be used by writers, and that anyone
with the slightest mechanical aptitude can do it without instructions! I
think it must simply be inevitable--to eliminate it would be to deny the
thing that sustains us.


Anyway, it amuses me.


Ned Bedinger
doc -at- edwordsmith -dot- com

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References:
RE: Pet Peeves: From: Dori Green
Re: Pet Peeves: From: Avram Baskin
Re: Pet Peeves: From: Geoff Lane
Re: Pet Peeves: From: Amy Gale
RE: Pet Peeves: From: Brierley, Sean
RE: Pet Peeves: From: Al Geist

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