Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Entitled to what?

I was scrolling through my google reader this evening and saw the following disclaimer on a blog to which I subscribe:

NOTE: In honor of No Cussing Week, I thought I’d take a minute to discuss my own swears. I know I’ve dropped some F-bombs in the last few posts. I do it on purpose, for a couple of reasons: (1) I swear quite a lot in real life. I enjoy it. And (2) I want to chase away as quickly as possible any uptight know-it-alls with overdeveloped senses of entitlement who might later be caught off guard by a random swear and then be inclined to send me cranky condescending emails about my language. Those emails are stupid, and I’m tired of getting them.

So what I want to know is:

  1. I (me, myself) try not to swear, both in real life and on my blog. It's just not part of my personal vibe. Does that make me an "uptight know-it-all"? I'm not saying I DON'T swear, I just tend not to.
  2. Does my NOT swearing offend my readers who enjoy the salty Anglo-Saxon-ness of it all?
  3. Or is it the act of sending the cranky e-mail that qualifies one as an u-k-i-a?
  4. And does writing an ultra-defensive blog post put one on the same category?
  5. And what kind of person finds a blog on the OPEN INTERNET and presumes that she, because she reads it, gets to dictate the content?
There are a few blogs I've stopped reading because I didn't like their tone, or their focus, or their language. Interestingly, my issues with language are usually not because of swearing, which really doesn't offend me to read as long as I feel it's honest and not just an adolescent bid for attention--I love "The Sopranos" and Stephen King books--but I get enough gratuitous vulgarity hanging around in a high school all day, I don't need it in my blog reading.

What makes you stop reading a blog? Would you tell the writer, or just delete the blog from your subscriptions or list of links?

3 comments:

Clumsy Knitter said...

I read that same blog too, and my only thought was that I would probably be defensive too if people were actually emailing me telling me that they don't like what I write. The language thing doesn't bother me one way or another.

FWIW, if I stop reading a blog, I don't bother saying anything about it. I don't write my blog for public approval, and I assume others don't as well.

Katie said...

Although, depending on my setting, I tend to swear a lot in RL, I rarely do on my blog, and if I do, it's generally to make a point. But swearing on someone's blog would never offend me. In fact, some of my favorite blog writers swear all of the time. But NOT swearing certainly isn't offensive (although I'll admit, sometimes too many "oh my goodness" or "dang" exclaimations irk me.)

I unsubscribe when 1) the blog is just too boring, or 2) if the person starts to be terribly annoying in general. But I don't tell the person (since I tend to lurk, they probably never knew I read in the first place).

If someone emailed me about language they didn't like on my blog, I'd simply say, "stop reading it, then."

gayle said...

I swear in RL, though not at my job. (Swearing at work gets you hauled up in front of a firing squad.) I tend not to swear on the blog, though I reserve the right to do so. I'm not offended by swearing on blogs I read, unless it's so constant that it becomes boring.
I've never informed a blogger I was unsubscribing. I generally drop blogs because of the writer's low level of literacy. I can only tolerate so many misspellings or grammatical errors before I reach for the unsubscribe button. The third of fourth "your" for "you're" can set me off, but the big flashpoint is "wah-lah." That one sets my teeth grinding for days.