Wallace’s nonfiction abounds with qualifiers like “sort of” and “pretty much” and sincerity-infusers like “really.” ... I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon.I've never read him and probably never will, but this does crack me up since it reminds me of a habit I had in AP History of filling up paper space on essay questions with "sort of" and "you know" instead of, you know, cracking a textbook. I can remember one instance in particular that was so egregious Mr. Smith allowed it to be passed around class, to the howling delight of everybody. Yes, that's the same Mr. Smith who also pulled this shit. Actually, his greatest "there's no way he wouldn't be sued if he did that today, along with Mr. Ponish's playfully pulling boys' shirttails out and saying 'shirttails out!'" hit was when he'd be passing graded tests back to us: you'd walk up to his desk to get yours, and if your grade was particularly shitty he'd exaggeratedly announce "whoops!" to the entire class. Awesome.
And yes, it's the same class as my first ever "F," thanks to falling in love for the first time. Grrr.
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