I'm not sure if this is incredibly apt or incredibly ironic, but I feel compelled to point out that you mean "impeccably" (or possibly "unimpeachably"?). :-)
I try not to pick at little details of people's posts unless the details are really important or I know them well enough to know they won't mind. I think among some of the picky pedants there's a big danger of misreading the point of a post, and responding to an implicit request for personal sympathy as if it was a request for some kind of impersonal proofreading of an academic paper, with nothing but corrections/facts/fixes (I'm not saying I'm never guilty of this myself -- I like fixing things & find it hard to resist!).
I do think it's a bad thing when people get bogged down in the tiny details at the expense of the bigger picture; but everybody does it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality), because the tiny details are the things they can get hold of. On the other hand, I think that tactic is often used quite deliberately as a way of derailing and undermining the argument, on the basis that if someone's wrong (or their rightness can be called into question) about a tiny fact then it immediately makes the rest of their argument invalid.
I suspect (thinking out loud now) it also makes a difference that the small points are much easier to stick in a short comment, whereas a big-picture response would probably merit a whole separate post (so the comments on a post may look disproportionately full of trivia, because the more in-depth responses are happening elsewhere).
BTW thank you for pointing me at http://maddox.xmission.com/ (http://maddox.xmission.com/), it keeps making me LOL!
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I'm not sure if this is incredibly apt or incredibly ironic, but I feel compelled to point out that you mean "impeccably" (or possibly "unimpeachably"?). :-)
I try not to pick at little details of people's posts unless the details are really important or I know them well enough to know they won't mind. I think among some of the picky pedants there's a big danger of misreading the point of a post, and responding to an implicit request for personal sympathy as if it was a request for some kind of impersonal proofreading of an academic paper, with nothing but corrections/facts/fixes (I'm not saying I'm never guilty of this myself -- I like fixing things & find it hard to resist!).
I do think it's a bad thing when people get bogged down in the tiny details at the expense of the bigger picture; but everybody does it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality), because the tiny details are the things they can get hold of. On the other hand, I think that tactic is often used quite deliberately as a way of derailing and undermining the argument, on the basis that if someone's wrong (or their rightness can be called into question) about a tiny fact then it immediately makes the rest of their argument invalid.
I suspect (thinking out loud now) it also makes a difference that the small points are much easier to stick in a short comment, whereas a big-picture response would probably merit a whole separate post (so the comments on a post may look disproportionately full of trivia, because the more in-depth responses are happening elsewhere).
BTW thank you for pointing me at http://maddox.xmission.com/ (http://maddox.xmission.com/), it keeps making me LOL!