Pun Salad

Just another helpful note in our occasional series: When e-mailing your technical support staff, there are a number of things that won't help get your problem solved:

• UPPERCASE SHOUTING.

• Lots of exclamation points!!!

• Sarcasm, unless it's clever.

• Profanity, unless it's really %&#*@!$ clever.

• Irrelevant details about how important you are to the smooth functioning of the organization.

Help is on the way, as prompt and effective as it would have been if you were polite and respectful. Probably. Almost.

However, you may be blogged about later.

(Previous notes here and here.)

• We blogged about good and bad apologies before, making the point that "I'm sorry if people were offended" is one trademark of a weaselly apology. Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log hilariously observes the "air quote" can be used effectively by baseball managers to emphasise the non-apology nature of such constructions.

• And as a total coincidence, a radio host in Ulster expressed July 4 wishes that President Bush "rot in hell." That was followed up by a "BBC spokesman" saying … wait for it … "We apologise for any offence caused."

  Not only weasels, you'll note, but they also spell funny. The article doesn't mention if any air quotes were used by anyone involved. (Via Instapundit.)

• Shelby Steele observes that if you're going to sin in public, you'll be better off sinning into your era's moral relativism instead of its puritanism, with two presidential data points provided. At the American Spectator, Paul Beston throws in another couple data points from the world of baseball, one being the air-quoting manager to which we referred above.

• Thomas Sowell takes issue with last week's deification of Teddy Roosevelt by Time magazine. After reading it, you may idly wonder about the practicality of reconfiguring Mount Rushmore: put Reagan up there, take Teddy down.