Blowing & Drifting

Forecast: Significant blowing and drifting, with the possibility of heavy accumulation in rural areas.

Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Anyone who's ever taught college writing has encountered that most cliche means of opening an essay: the "According to Webster's, the definition of X is..." It's shoddy writing, to be sure, and I have had no qualms about banning the gimmick's use in classes I've taught.

But in reading blogs and especially in listening to presentations at work, I've found a new Digital Age version of that old standby: quoting the meaningless number of Google hits returned by a search on X. Quoting hitcount (a neologism which returns 537,000  hits!) is not quite as shoddy as citing a definition (94,500 results!), but it's close. And it may be worse for the way the hitcount gimmick tries to smuggle an utterly false sense of quantitative accuracy into the still-embryonic argument. A Google search is the opposite of accuracy: it's a way of casting a phenomenally wide net into an impossibly large ocean. What you find in the net isn't at all random, but then again it's also such an entropic mish-mash that you really ought not to make any meaningful claims about the catch - except maybe, "The ocean makes things wet."