Getting Hailed on Again.

I had two replies on YouTube last night, one from a man and one from a woman, both of which were hysterical in their own way. And they both told me I’m stupid.

You’re the proverbial ant who people try to explain Miami Beach to. Only you’re too stupid to realize it, said one.

I shuddered at the parlous state of the English. I suppose it’s unreasonable to expect that somebody who knows what ‘proverbial’ means (assuming that the ant and Miami Beach story really is proverbial) and who also knows that the adjective ‘too’ has two o’s in it would endeavour not to end a sentence with a preposition when it makes the statement quite as clumsy as that… but I do. She continued:

You’re arrogant and ignorant. The worst combo.

And that tirade (all eighteen lines of it) was the result of my suggestion that the Gospels are unreliable as a history source, and that nobody really knows who Jesus was or what he actually taught. Ah, well.

The second said come back when you get smarter, like in twenty years.

But I might be dead in twenty years. What should I do? I went to bed feeling shell-shocked.

(And now I’m wondering whether it’s right to hyphenate ‘shell-shocked.’ My feeling is that the noun ‘shell shock’ has no use for a hyphen, but the adjective ‘shell-shocked’ does.)

Oh, and I had another comment on YouTube from a grammar Nazi. He said Please don’t leave. The world needs more people like us.

Does it? Or do the banana merchants just need more trade?