Dear Colleagues, Joining Eszter Hargittai, I also request that members of this list do not carelessly repost earlier messages. Careful editing will make the Internet a better place to live. After general spam and porn spam, the third great email irritation is careless posting to lists that are better served by selective editorial attention. In the old days, when we wrote on paper or pressed cuneiform wedges into clay, we used a technology called "quoting." A quote was a selective passage taken from a relevant text and applied to the topic or theme at hand. Back in the Temple of Uruk, the head scribe instructed us on how to do this. We were taught to take a passage of text, surrounding it with the little double-wedge signs of quotation, to write carefully, "so that my name should be established for distant days and never fall into oblivion, so that my praise should be spread throughout the Land, and my glory should be proclaimed in the foreign lands." Then we would bake the tablet and hand it to a runner who would take it on the post-road that served as a pre-electronic Internet located in the linked highway nodes, river routes, oases, and cities of our physical world. (The physical world involved a kind of reality that existed before virtual reality.) In the AIR world, all these functions happen using electrons to transfer messages at the speed of light. Nevertheless, the habits once instilled by the temple scribes and carried forward into the eras of papyrus and parchment would do well here. We are still close to the era when Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society wrote that good scientific and scholarly communication required, "a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness." Needless clutter defeats the plain language and clarity we ought to encourage. Those who write carefully are more widely read and far more useful than those who litter notes with carelessly repeated headers, footers, forwarding arrows, and nested passages of clutter. Those who write carefully will join the great Sumerian who proclaimed, "Wherever I look to, there I go; wherever my heart desires, I reach. By the life of my father holy Lugalbanda, and Nanna the king of heaven and earth, I swear that the words written on my tablet are true!" Best regards, Ken Friedman The Sumerians also had careless forwards and reposts. This is my favorites, found in level 3 of the Suen excavations,
I entered the E-kic-nujal like a mountain kid hurrying to its habitation, when Utu spreads broad daylight over the countryside. I filled with abundance the temple of Suen, a cow-pen which yields plenty of fat. I had oxen slaughtered there; I had sheep lavishly butchered there. I had cem and ala drums resound there and caused tigi drums play there sweetly. I, Culgi, who makes everything abundant, presented food-offerings there and, like a lion, spreading fearsomeness from the royal offering-place, I bent down and bathed in flowing water; I knelt down and feasted in the E-gal-mah of Ninegal.