Here’s a good insult for you.
My great favourite Dr. Johnson said unkindly of the playwright Sheridan (who was actually brilliant) :
“Why, Sir, Sherry is dull, naturally dull. But it must have taken a deal of effort to become as we see him now. Such an excess of stupidity is not in nature.”
This brings me to my favourite subject – me.
You probably never noticed, but yesterday I sent out a blog heading without copy which read “Another magnificent display of incompetence from the man who has infuriated” – then stopped.
You could call this “art imitating life”. It may not have infuriated anyone – we get an ample supply of garbage in our in-boxes already – but it certainly was incompetent.
The question is, though, can I blame the internet for my excess of stupidity?
I think it enables me to make the sort of mistakes I’ve always made – but much faster.
For instance, years ago I wrote a mailing for Management Today. After it went out (instead of before, which would have been intelligent) I rang my friend Victor Ross, former chairman of The Reader’s Digest to ask if he’d look over the mailing.
He had actually received it, and said: “You have not said whether it’s a weekly or a monthly.”
Luckily the mailing did pretty well – but no thanks to my stupidity.
With the help of the internet I could have made the mistake much faster (and less expensively).
