Talkbackers rule
The glorious talkbacks
When you read talkbacks carefully, you see that only very few talkbackers actually react to article itself
I am an enthusiastic reader of the talkbacks following any article, which gives the reader a possibility to participate and allows him to deliver his opinion on the matter.
In the old days, when the daily, weekly or monthly paper carried an article, the reader could not react fast, and the writer would never know, if he reached his audience and succeeded in passing his message.
But, funny enough, when you read these talkbacks carefully, you see that only very few talkbackers actually react to the article itself and most of their comments deal with irrelevant radical opinions.
Many talkbacks are written in such a manner they will annoy most of the readers. Could it be that those commentators try to shock the reader, by writing controversial issues, mostly without signing their full names?
Then we have those using inflammatory words such as "self aggrandizing bigot." I looked it up, when I noticed that the prince of talkbackers, p.HENRY, uses the same peculiar term in numerous talkbacks, reacting on articles of different authors.
The author, not the article
For those of us with less time on hand, the word "aggrandizing" means bragging or boasting.
The same lover of scrabble words, uses terms such as "effete, obfuscation, innuendoes, frump, frazzled," (the last two words were used when he needed in his scrabble game, words beginning with letters "fr"), but funny enough, with or without dictionary, you realize that his prose has no relation to the article, but to his professional evaluation of the author.
Nice are also labels such as "sarcastic ignoramus", and "liberal hogwash", expressions which are rich and colorful, and less insulting than "mediocre".
More than half of the talkbacks are comments on talkbacks of other talkbacks, on subjects not or slightly related to the text of article in question, a rather funny example, I saw last week, is the non existence of the "p" in the Arab language, with the conclusion that Palestinians don't exist, as that name begins with a "p".
Most talkbackers do not sign, or sing with a "non de plume", such as "the termite", "Demosthenes", "the shadow", etc., why is that, are they ashamed for what they wrote?
There are also trigger words, which, which mentioned in an article, create many talkbacks, samples are: Palestine, peace, anti-Semitism, Islam, or dirty words such as nudism, pacifism, sex and love.
In order to receive more talkbacks, I want to finish with a trigger rich anecdote, a Jewish boy (no other Jews in the town) went to a Catholic school. His teacher, during a quiz asked him as follows: It is brown, jumps from branch to branch, has a long furry tail, and eats nuts, what is it? The boy thought for a while, before answering, "Logically I assume it is a squirrel, but it could be, you refer again to the little child 'Jesus.'"
Happy holidays, keep talkbacking.
