Yesterday evening the Montclair State University's School of Business held its Convocation for the graduating class of 2008. Guest speaker Craig Newmark received an honorary doctorate for his achievements with craigslist.com . Ah yes, a website where you can do anything, from trading tickets to graduation so that your aunt can come along, to selling your body for World of Warcraft merchandise.
In all seriousness, Dr. Newmark (or Dr. Dr. Newmark as it were now) is a huge supporter of internet democracy (yay freedom!) and passed on some solid advice to the graduates. Growing up the cliche "nerd" (his word) he knew what it was like the feel left out. So he made sure that he kept two philosophies in mind when starting Craigslist: treat others as you want to be treated, and include everyone.
Newmark blogged about the experience in his personal blog, and seemed quite taken with the fact that Stephen Colbert lives nearby. He expected to come away from the experience "more doctorate-y." Indeed he did.
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Comments (6)
"Growing up the cliche nerd...?" I'm willing to mentally add a word or two for the sake of grammatical sense, but this sentence in its entirety seems to call for a good bit more.
Sentence good... must warn Cathar...
Welcome aboard Matthew, and be prepared to have your pachydermicit-y tested at every turn by even the most unqualified critics on this ship of fools. Even if they like what you say, they are liable to not like how you said it. And vice-versa, fer shure.
I don't think the sentence is "good," Conan. I don't even think the entire item can serve as a model of clean, expository prose. It reminded me of Dierdre of the grammatical sorrows at her very "best."
"As it were now," for example?
I don't know of a muse named Diedre; at least not a literary one.
And to make the circle of life complete, these MSU grads can now use craigslist to find perhaps the only job with a salary high enough to afford recent grads the opportunity to continue living in Montclair:
craigslist in montclair
Deirdre Day McLeod of the grammatical sorrows (my own reference to Irish mythology and to plays by Yeats and Synge) had the weekend gig here in this very space for a while, Conan. And seemingly her every post provoked howls of outrage from many posters, such seemed to be her general unfamiliarity with English grammar, sentence structure and spelling.
Oddly, she is a published author. I suspect, then, that she simply rushed through her weekend duties for this site. (If not, if her command of her mother tongue really is that bad, she owes a debt akin to that of third world nations to their creditors to her copy editors.) In any case, she disappeared from this site after some months, leaving the question of whether she fell or was pushed. How soon we forget!