style

"With precious few exceptions, all the books on style in English are by writers quite unable to write. The subject, indeed, seems to exercise a special and dreadful fascination over schoolma'ms, bucolic college professors, and other such pseudo-literates....Their central aim, of course, is to reduce the whole thing to a series of simple rules — the overmastering passion of their melancholy order, at all times and everywhere."

- H.L. Mencken

I like this quote. Few things are worse than "melancholy order".

Mencken goes on to insist that style - and logic itself - is "congenital" and cannot be taught, but I'm not so sure about that. I would agree that you can't teach someone who doesn't think...but can you teach someone to think? I think so.

I dig Mencken, largely because we both agree that most people are idiots. However, I think they're intellectually lazy, not intrinsically stupid. People are mindless sheep, not because they're incapable of knowing, but because they don't want to know.

You can teach people to think; you just can't make them want to learn.