A fine rant
The best brush-off evah-
A quick note to anyone who has got it in their mind to send me bitchy e-mail: My tolerance for said e-mail appears to be very short these days, so do me the favor of front-loading whatever relevant thing you have to say, because if you don't, it's likely that I won't get to it because I've stopped reading before you've made your point.
This comes in the wake of having received a ten or twelve paragraph e-mail by one of those nutbag childfree folks. As most of you know, I enjoy getting hateful mail from psychotic people, because usually nothing perks up the day like invective hurled at you by someone you don't know. But this time around, I just wasn't into it. The first paragraph just wasn't there, you know? It was clear that this woman was yet another of those people incensed that the world would not give her love and chocolates just because she's decided to make her inchoate loathing of children a cornerstone of her life. And really, I've been down this aisle and I've checked out all the specials. The prospect of wading through yet another of these formless rants just to be polite filled my brain with a lassitude the consistency of heavy molasses prior to a February thaw.
So I didn't bother. Instead, I wrote to my correspondent:
I'm sorry, I lost interest in your message after the first paragraph and couldn't be bothered to finish it. No doubt it was very clever and devastating and if it makes you feel good, please consider me abashed or chagrined or whatever it was that you intended me to feel after reading your brilliant, scintillating words. In the meantime, allow me to congratulate you in your decision not to breed, as clearly a person of your qualities represents a full stop on the genetic paragraph; the evolution of your line need go no further.
Please feel free to respond, whereupon I'll be happy to ignore you again in greater detail.
Bye, now.
It gets better, read it all. The fun continues in the comments-
It wasn't a polite request, it you telling me what to do on my own site, and not many people use the phrase "kindly avoid [insert thing here]" in a polite manner. My response in such cases is almost always "fuck you, I'll do as I please." When you want to make a polite request, please try to actually phrase it politely and not imperatively. You'll notice a difference in the response.
As for the particular phrasing, your choice to interpret it in a particular way does not oblige me to care, or retract.
Why people would take on a professional wordsmith on his own blog is an inchoate mystery to me.