as he lapsed into a bit of crankiness regarding the matter

Sycophantic mollusc, if you please Don, if you in insist on quoting me directly, but otherwise a fascinating précis of the proceedings thus far even if you do overlook the main meat of the discussion to concentrate on the derogatory ephemera, which, I feel, were entirely justified given the tone of your own posts (and those of your Sycophantic Mollusc). Thus do I say puerile, inane, nick-picking, smug, shameful righteous priggery and all, for such, I fear, is the real nature of all pedantry, which is not born out of a love of language per se, but a deep seated cultural insecurity that somehow needs to defame and abuse according to a rule which, as I hope I've shown, is barely relevant to the language itself.

This tone is further born out in your shameful P. S. Now, back to tormenting WAV!! statement, and in your somewhat perplexing account of your university friend, reducing him to a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal stereotype because, presumably, he had the temerity to think for himself. Oh my aching sides, Don - but this is where the humour drains away, as does the blood from my face, in open-mouthed disbelief at such a willingness to resort to tactics which are, I feel, not only underhand but positively inhumane; using your finely honed linguistic skills to snipe at fish in a fecking barrel for Christ's sake, whilst obviously deriving much gloating satisfaction from doing so.

Apart from anything else, such an approach only serves to trivialise the real issues at stake in what has fast become the Walkabout Witch-trials which have nothing to do with his poetry nor yet his language skills, rather the somewhat suspect tenets that would appear to lie behind his overall philosophy. Whatever the truth of this, nothing frightens me more than a mob, because whilst one level I'm right back in the burning windmill with Frankenstein's hapless creation (which is precisely where James Whale wanted us to be), on the other I'm singing Psalm 23 with Sergeant Howie in the analogous closing scene of The Wicker Man - which is certainly not where Robin Hardy wanted us to be, thus unwittingly creating as tidy a cinematographic equivalent of The Milgram Experiment as ever there as, I'm sure.

This thread (which is not a WAV thread, please note) has become a haven from the open riot presently going on over at English Folk Degree?, and whilst the hullabaloo seems to have abated somewhat, one stills gets the feeling of broken glass crunching underfoot as one picks ones way through the debris, expecting to find WAV's charred and mangled corpse hanging from a tree for having however so innocently trespassed into areas best left alone. Innocence, I feel, is the key here, and context of course, although it's maybe easy to mistake it for ignorance in the white heat of our righteous passion, thus forgetting about where we are, or what, for that matter, we're actually dealing with.

Overeacting? Maybe so, but that's par for the course on Mudcat, and forums in general, where, as I've said elsewhere, if we were all sitting face to face in a pub I'm sure there wouldn't be a cross word.

Sorry about the American jibe, by the way; I am too, alas, only human after all.