Super Cilious

I have been savaged as being a supercilious drone. No, really! I know it's hard to believe, but there you are. I come across in a certain way, I guess, when I write. The criticism was directed there: if you want to fancy yourself Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, so be it, but for me... And so on. Well, I used to be sorry when I irritated people. I regret it now, but I'm not really sorry. That's the way it is. If I didn't do it that way, I would be mute. A long time ago, I faced the dilemma: what do you do when you write something that other people may not be familiar with? Well, it seems to me that this comes up quite frequently. I am not smarter, but I am an obsessive reader. So, I can either (1) just write the way I do and hope everything is cool, or (2) I can explain things at length, thereby insulting my audience by always assuming they don't know what I'm saying. I did not want to be so openly arrogant as to imply everybody was a ninny. I mean, who'd want to read the twaddle if you were always insulting them? So I write it the way it comes into my head...cry havoc...and let slip the dogs of war!! (This was the quote that got me attacked: cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war. I tried to explain that at the time I was writing something and I was really, really, really short of time and needed to put something down, so I immediately went to Shakespeare - as we all do in similar circumstances! And you don't even have to say it was Shakespeare; you could assert it was Christopher Plummer playing the Klingon General Chang in Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country!)