The Lexicographer's Rules

Lord of the Flies. “Thousands of people have no idea that responding to a listserve will broadcast your response to all recipients. Repeated ‘But I don’t even smoke!’ messages reveal an apparently deep-seated belief that spam is somehow targeted at individuals rather than carpet-bombed. Each recipient seemed to think that each unsub demand was directed to them—which reveals how many people have never been on a listserve before, have absolutely no idea what they’re experiencing. Everyone threatens to rat the spammer out to their own ISP (‘If you don’t stop, I’ll tell AOL on you!’). Even after hundreds of repetitions, people are not able to infer that all replies are being refelected to all—which made me wonder how people get through the day to begin with.”

“We get hundreds of applications for every job we advertise. Too many to go through. But we have developed a strategy for dealing with them. Before scanning the CVs, we split the pile in two and chuck half away. After all, you don’t want unlucky people working for you."—Adrian Monick, Hiring horror stories….

“I have been asked if I do not find it strange that Vanessa Redgrave is playing me. I explain: Vanessa Redgrave is not playing me, Vanessa Redgrave is playing a character who, for the sake of clarity, is called Joan Didion.…It would be logical to assume that I adopted this distance to protect myself. It would also be wrong. The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside. I would need to locate the dissonance between the person I thought I was and the person other people saw."—"Joan Didion, The Year of Hoping for Stage Magic

“To be brutally frank with you, abuse is like beauty. It’s in the eyes of the beholder.…A loud voice, anything, can be called abuse.”—"For Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews” by Ian Urbina.

No political party seems to care much about the working man’s life, Mr. Warner feels. Stick a Republican and a Democrat in a sack, shake it up, pour it out, and the same rapacious thing crawls out. Creatures from a smoke-filled room. (Source Link)