User:Tom harrison/quotes

Great quotations

 * Look, he's winding up the watch of his wit; by and by it will strike. from The Tempest
 * "...there are some people who construe any response at all into affirmation: if absurdity receives a reply then they claim it merits discussion, then dignify it into difference of opinion, etc." -- Durova, 19:14, 17 January 2007
 * Musical Linguist's Favourites
 * "Do you believe that a text has only one true meaning, generally that intended by the author of the text? If you answer 'yes,' you are, by my definition, a fundamentalist, whether the text you are thinking of is The Bible, The Communist Manifesto, Euclid's Elements, Moby-Dick, or something else. If this be the case, sooner or later you and I will find it very hard to understand each other." -- Slrubenstein
 * Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation says "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror."
 * Adams' razor: The explanation that you believe is correct will always seem simplest to you.

The triumph of hope over experience

 * "...maybe if Mr. Harrison were able to put his objections in the form of reasoned discourse onto the talk page, his problems could be solved." Yeah, maybe.

All right-thinking people agree with me

 * "If you can't detatch yourself enough to see that I am right about this, I suggest that neither of you continue contributing to this article." Talk:September 11, 2001 attacks, 22:33, 20 December 2006
 * "HI THERE, why did you delete my edit. what i said about sept 11 was true."

Conspiracy theory

 * Men with a crank, and men with a fad, and men with an axe to grind

Conspiracy theory is a set phrase, specifically an idiom.

"How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy, a conspiracy on a scale so immense to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man...." - Senator Joseph McCarthy, 1951

"...every time one of those Loose Change dickwads opens his mouth, a Republican somewhere picks up five votes."

"There is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wind. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind." - Richard Hofstadter, 1964

Proof by assertion is "often used by those holding strong but controversial opinions, particularly where there is a lack of credible evidence to back them up." As a corollary, the phrase "I know for a fact" does not have the rhetorical effect that you intend it to have.

"These people (in the 9/11 truth movement) use the 'reverse scientific method,'" Eagar said. "They determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn't fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion."

Questions that should more frequently be asked
Q''Can I add anything I want to an article if I begin with "Some people say..." and end with a link to my blog?''
 * ANo.

Edit summaries

 * Do you refer to your preferred version as the "NPOV version" in edit summaries?
 * Saying that your edit fosters NPOV is pointless. POV is like sin: everybody is against it. In the edit summary just record what you did, not how virtuous you are.
 * If you are just going to say, "Improved clarity," you might as well say nothing.

"Note that..." and all its kin
Just note it! Prepending "Note that" makes the writing sound pompous, not serious and encyclopedic. Rather than writing, "Note that the Roman Empire was very large," just write, "The Roman Empire was very large." If what is left seems insipid, reconsider whether to write it at all.

"It is said..."
If it's unsupported, take it out; If it's controversial, cite a source; Otherwise, just say it.

Everything is a term
Nominalization is a term for the glyphic representation of a spoken English vocalization signal intended to reference a sheaf of practices for the avoidance of concrete statement-making. Stop it. Man up and say something.

We'd have better writing if we'd write articles about things instead of terms. Not to single anybody out, but stained glass should be about stained glass, not about the term "stained glass."

Articles
To write correct English, you have to use the correct articles. Say The Bible, or The Qur'an, but just Jesus or Muhammad. If it's appropriate in the context to specify prophet, say The Prophet Muhammad. If you write Prophet Muhammad said..., that makes it sound like his first name was Prophet.