Cuz I can!!

I just got an email that qualifies as one of my favorite ever.

I really am loving your website www.paleothea.com but

you are far too intelligent to use "cuz" for because.

Best wishes,
Sharon

In a way, she’s right. I would never hand a paper into a teacher with “cuz” in it – and I like to giggle to myself about students copying and pasting directly from the site without stopping to correct such silliness – and that’s because I’m generally writing focused formal arguments. This website though? Not so much with the formal.

I imagine that at least part of my audience is made up of adolescents like the ones I try to tell stories to on long bus rides for field trips, etc. You might accuse me of talking down to people – and at one level you’d be right – but what I had in mind more was writing like I actually talk. Recording the stories like I tell them out loud – except that you can’t see my hands flailing or me winking at you. There’s precedence for this – most translations of plays do something similar, and of course not a few of the myths included in Women In Greek Myths are elaborated on thus.

My site ain’t the best researched, the best annotated, the funniest, the most beautiful or, unfortunately, the most accessible. It includes random typos, and slang and the occasional curse. Because it’s been around for so long, my site still gets a fair amount of traffic. But now there are options like theoi.com that give you the original sources (in translation) and brief explanations that are totally accessible. To be perfectly honest, his site’s so good, I’m tempted to stop paying rent and let mine disappear into internet oblivion. Nonetheless, I’m still here for now.

Hope you don’t mind, too much. 🙂