Before the Internet, there was plenty of hate mail-there was just no place to print your hate mail. Editors kept it in a file called "Hilarious/Crazy/Scary" and never would it appear in a magazine. Nowadays, praise be, we can see the grand range of human emotion and grammar all throughout the tubes of the webs. Let's take a look back at what used to pass for acceptable hate mail, in the form of letters to Life about that terrible housewife, Joan Didion.
Why, oh why, is she not more sunshiney.
Back to the kitchen, etc.
Here, for a palate cleanser, you can read 1950 Was More Than 20 Years Ago.
Still counting fingers, but I think your math is off. How is it "more than"?
Was James McGrath trying to give Life a confused either-she-goes-or-I-do ultimatum?
Goodbye to all that!
The "I feel sorry for you" theme of the first one foreshadows a huge fraction of posts in online arguments. If the writer had also thrown in a "you're just jealous," the internet, and perhaps the last decade in cultural polemics, wouldn't have needed to happen.
"she's a swell phrase-turner"
I can just see that as a blurb on the cover of 'Slouching Towards Bethlehem '
I don't know, I kind of like ol' Sandra Hawk. I didn't realize that snark existed before 1997.
What's more, she's hypocritical anti-snark snark! I can see the ol' girl telling off Dave Eggers "haters."
I hate it that they took "Cancel my subscription" away from us.
Phrase-Turner was an unsuccessful Steve Ditko character from before he went all Objectivist.