A relatively recent trend in journalism is NOT to clean up direct quotations from interview subjects, because the interviewer wants to represent accurately the interviewee’s personality, rhythms of speech, and so on. At the other extreme is the old-fashioned “Make the oafish athlete sound like a doctoral candidate” approach. I tend to keep hands off, although sometimes it’s tempting to try to tart up a commenter’s product. :)

You’re right about WordPress-vs-Blogger in that respect. In a way, Blogger’s letting you delete your own comments is a dangerous feature — because there’s no way for Blogger to guarantee that the “you” deleting your comment is, in fact, you. More problematic to me is that there’s no built-in facility to revise a comment before posting. (The blog admin can install any of various WordPress plugins to enable that, but I get really nervous about adding too many plugins — there’s almost no way to be sure they’re all playing nicely together.)

I had thought of doing it myself, but wasn’t sure if you’d seen it yet; I didn’t want to confuse you if you’d been offline for a few days and suddenly found your comment folder filled with duplicate anecdotes from me!

I thought it would be a snip to sort out for an IT-whizz like you. And you do seem to bustle around quite often tidying up the comment threads with a proprietorial pride. Sorry if it wasn’t as straightforward as I had supposed – but I thought you would actually prefer to do it yourself… with all of that fussy attention to detail like replicating the original timestamp!

(And I’ve only just noticed, but…. you can’t delete your own comments here? Is that the one superior facility that Blogger boasts over WordPress??)

And what is a BECKENSTEIN slice? A technique in pathology, perhaps? Yet another ReCaptcha conundrum.

(I really shouldn’t tempt the gods of zemblanity with assertions like that.)

marta: The only problem with using a brand-new word, especially one not formed from one or more existing, familiar words, is that you’ve pretty much got to repeat the definition every time you use the word. Or just drop the word into context, undefined, and trust the reader/listener to do some research and/or figure it out via context.

Readers/Listeners who can be trusted that far are probably the exception!

Froog: If Boyd had even imagined such a pun on the word, his embarrassment might well have prevented us from ever learning the word. I myself am always happy to find someone unembarrassed by godawful puns, though. (Even erudite godawful ones. Heh.)

[Moved that misplaced comment for you, btw. Not something I'd want to do every day, but at least now I know it's possible!]

That’s a word I’m going to love.

recaptcha: this fathomed

Hope your weekend is one of serendipity and not zemblanity, J. :)