I'm not getting down in the gutter with this guy

as Eisenhower said about Joe McCarthy, or at least not in direct address, but over here where nobody is listening (yes, I know), I'll say that I still can't get over the guy who denounced my Tolkien Society blog post.

Asked (by somebody else) to explain his evaluation, he said that "it would work as a social media post." But if it would work as anything, it couldn't possibly be "the most badly written piece of garbled English I have ever read" as he'd said earlier. That's just a drive-by insult, then, and all he really meant was that he thought the tone of discourse, the voice it was written in, inappropriate for the forum.

That'd be a reasonable criticism if he'd said so originally. Still, I have news for him. It's a blog. It says "blog" in big letters at the top of the page. A blog is a form of social media. The whole purpose of the TS blog is for discursive informal pieces without the formal and impartial journalistic style of, say, the TS press releases.

Of the various inaccurate specific charges he makes, which merely suggest he has serious reading deficiencies, one is susceptible to simple objective identification: sentence fragments. There's nothing necessarily wrong about sentence fragments; it depends on how they're used. There's only two utterances in my post that aren't full regular sentences: one exclamation and one exhoratory imperative (the latter is the first sentence of the last paragraph). That's not too many, and both are standard forms of discourse in informal writing.

I could go through the sequence of paragraphs and show how each is related to its neighbors, but that would be wearisome and I don't he'd be capable of following it anyway, if he had trouble with the original. As for finding anything hilariously ambiguous in the identification of Christopher's son, that's just pathetic.