words that kill

A concerned academic e-mails me to say:

your promises, promises blog entry was a bit cryptic, and kept me begging for

more.  i can only hope that it is not my [paper] with which you are 

upset.  while the act of reading my [paper] would perhaps lead     

people to want to take their own lives, i don't think that anything i 

advocate in it, if taken seriously, would result in untimely deaths

(human, or otherwise).  on the other hand, regarding your resolution (not

vow), you probably wouldn't learn very much from this dribble, leading me 

to conclude that my [paper] is a sort of benign tumor.  so i can only guess 

that your beef is with studs terkel...

I saw Studs Terkel last weekend, twice. He made me laugh the first time, and would have made me laugh the second had they not been the same jokes as the first time. Most people over 90 can't even make me laugh once, so he deserves credit for that alone.

For the record, I have not read anything in sociology recently that, if it were taken seriously by the public, would specifically kill Studs Terkel, which is not to say that he might not be an incidental casualty.