By David Futrelle
So I have discovered — a little belatedly — what may be the worst-written sentence in the English language. Or at least the worst sentence ever written by someone who thought he was writing the best sentence.
It comes from a blog called One Angry Gamer, near the end of a post from 2017 hailing the opening of the game industry conference E3 to the public as a giant victory for true gamers like himself, and a crushing blow to SJW game journalists.
If that all sounds very 2014, it’s because Mr. One Angry Gamer is an unapologetic GamerGater who hasn’t stopped GamerGating even though the movement he was once such an enthusiastic participant in has largely been subsumed into the broader far-right resurgence.
In his post, OAG celebrated E4’s policy change as if it were a world-historic victory for civil rights.
The news recently went out that the ESA will open up E3 2017 to everybody. All gamers from all walks of life and all backgrounds, from all over the world, each one coming in different shapes and sizes, will be able to attend the event.
We haven’t gotten to the worst sentence yet. But I do like OAG’s inadvertent assertion that every gamer is simultaneously small, medium and large.
Typically, some SJWs were not pleased that real gamers would be able to finally bypass the uninformed, fascists [sic] gatekeepers known as game journalists, and see and experience the games and technology for themselves.
His evidence that SJW “fascists” were furious over this development? He found a few alleged SJWs making jokes about it.
But OAG was just getting warmed up. He went on to declare that these evil SJWs
were hoping that this would be a short-lived exercise in pro-consumerism, hoping desperately that the legs of opportunity would close shut tight on gamers in years to come.
The, er, legs of opportunity? That might close? So gamer dudes are basically fucking opportunity, and this makes SJWs mad?
It’s pretty clear that Mr. One Angry Gamer is not so much angry as horny.
Like, really horny. The weird sexual metaphors quickly got even weirder — and rape-ier.
Other SJWs found [the opening of E3 to the public] to be a mistake, a blasphemous call for the hydra of consumerism to emerge from the far corners of the interwebs; a stake to the heart of game journalism’s oligarchy; a raping of the gated clique that once controlled the foyer of information that lactated from the bulbous PR udders dangling from the publishers’ visceral bloat that drips begrudgingly through the sphincter of the media and out through the curdled lips of their blogs.
Excuse me?
I’m having a bit of trouble trying to visualize the assorted mixed metaphors in that sentence. Could someone draw me a picture?
By the way, despite all the incoherent, sexualized body horror of that last sentence, we still haven’t gotten to the worst one.
One Horny Gamer continued on with the body horror theme:
Others tried defending the old guard, pretending as if the cavernous opening in the rectum major gaming sites’ advertising opportunities makes them reliable, trustworthy, independent journalists with the interests of gamers in mind.
There seems to be a word missing there, or maybe a dozen, but somehow I don’t think even the most careful proofreading could have rescued that sentence.
After several more paragraphs attacking SJW game journalists, and one defending the glory that was #GamerGate, One Horny Gamer delivered up the masterpiece of bad writing that I’ve been warning you about this whole time.
Take a deep breath.
Here it is:
Gamers’ milky victory secreted onto the tongue of SJWs’ pride, languishing there like a badge of honor that can’t be rinsed away; all while the pole of ethics lodged its way down the orifice of corruption, filling the gaping hole with improved policies and updated disclosures, changing the landscape of media journalism forever.
Wow.
I would try to break that sentence down, but frankly my brain froze up after I tried to imagine someone trying and failing to rinse away a badge made of semen that was stuck to their tongue.
Maybe gamers really were a mistake.
I’m going to go lie down for awhile.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @CranBoonitz for highlighting OAG’s amazing post.
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P.S. thank you David for the adorable brain bleach.
@Vucodlak
Your actual description was so good that when I googled for a picture, it was slightly disappointing 😀
There’s a perfectly simple explanation.
Information is exactly like a building. Not a shed or a terraced house (row house) but some big classy building like, I don’t know, Trump Tower? Dunno who built it, or whether the contractors ever got paid, but pretty sure someone has lied about how many storeys (floors) the building has.
So naturally, like any prestigious buildings, information has a foyer. With receptionists and security in there too.
Now, the thing about the foyer of information, is that it’s controlled by a clique (probably those receptionists and security guards noted above).
But not just any clique – this is one is the worst kind of clique, a clique with gates. A gated clique who are hehehehe gatekeeping (see what I did there?) the foyer of the building which is information.
Now, the unusual thing about this foyer is that, unlike most foyers, it has been produced by lactation.
The whole building, (which is, as we’ve established, information) has been lactated: exuded as milk from a mammal.
Not sure what kind of a mammal, but probably a bovine one that is overdue milking time, as its udders are apparently bulbous. Maybe it hasn’t exuded enough foyers recently, or the dairy staff at the milking parlour are on a go-slow.
These are actually PR udders. I know you’ve been told PR is a profession, but they lied to you: turns out it’s a body part. A body part – namely udders – somehow attached to publishers.
Publishers in general, or one kind of publisher in particular? Well, the science is not yet clear: possibly all publishers have udders which can lactate parts of buildings. Not sure whether they can lactate bathrooms and committee rooms too, or whether it’s just foyers, but lactate foyers is a definite. It’s pretty much all that publishers do.
And you can clearly see why the publishers are having trouble lactating more foyers for more buildings, because they also suffer from visceral bloat.
Viscera generally means the intestines, so either the publishers have got hehehehe a lot of guts (see what I did there?) or a bad case of bloated intestines – possibly IBS – and as the udders are connected to the guts (in publishers, though not in any other creature), you can understand why this might make milking them difficult. I guess that’s why we currently have a foyer shortage. And don’t let’s get into the information foyer cheese drought! When did you last see the cheese of the foyers of information at your local deli? I can’t even remember, it must be so long ago.
You can probably now begin to appreciate why foyer dairy farming is such an unpopular occupation.
What makes it even trickier is that you can only milk the udders of information from the bloated viscera of the publishers to get your foyers of information nice and fresh by first positioning the udders so that the foyers can drip begrudgingly into the sphincters of the media. It has to be begrudgingly rather than joyfully, tenderly, or in 3/4 time with a syncopated beat. Look, it just does, OK? It’s a hell of a logistical problem, for a start.
The media needs the sphinctal drips from the painfully undermilked udders of the bloated IBS guts of publishers so that the lactated foyers in the building which is information, complete with the clique controlling that foyer (who all have gates) can be passed, in a reverse digestive process that is a little-known skill of all media professionals, from back end to front end in order to reach their blogs. (I must admit, blogs is a tad weak: such an anti-climax. But reality is sometimes underwhelming).
Not surprisingly, given the bloated guts and the sore udders, the begrudgingness of the dripping and so on, there’s some curdling going on in the world of informational foyer dairying.
Unusually, it’s the lips that curdle: a more prosaic mind would have gone for the milk products themselves, but that would have been inaccurate. But at least is the lips of the blogs, not of the media: that would have been silly.
Anyway, turns out that there are Social Justice Warriors who fear that opening a conference to anyone who wants to buy a ticket will involve the rape of those gated cliques in the foyers in the building which is information during the process of the publishers lactating those foyers up the bums of the media who digest it backwards and pass it onto their blogs, which have got lips. Curdled ones.
And it is with this that the writer takes issue. And who among us can say he’s wrong?
I’m pretty sure no gated cliques will be assaulted while controlling the milky foyers of information that have been lactated by publishers from their uncomfortable guts up the back passages of the media on the way to curdling the lips of practically any blog you could mention.
… uhhhh… yeah, what bluecat said.
Yeah
Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that the first E3 open to the general public will also be the last?
*solemnly takes hat off*
Marry me, bluecat. Let us birth great literature. In the, you know, appropriate direction.
If one assumes – safely – that Horny Gamer isn’t the world’s greatest writer and doesn’t have an editor look over his “work” before posting it, one could see the first clause of the sentence:
as using the past progressive tense but failing to include the necessary auxiliary verb, which would make “milky victory” the object of that clause, like so:
This would also make it the object that is languishing on the “tongue of SJWs’ pride.”
…that still doesn’t explain why one would try to rinse away a badge of honor, but Horny Gamer isn’t exactly a competent writer on a grammatical level, so it’s no surprise that metaphor is waaaaaaaay beyond his ability to secrete….
Can I interject with a question that is tangentially relevant (at best) but which somehow manages to confuse the fuck out of me nonetheless?
If E3 wasn’t open to the public, who was it open to?
I’ve been of the impression that it’s a fairly big convention for a while now and I have a hard time believing it was held just for game journalists. I mean, how many game journalists can there really be in America, a few hundred?
This guy sounds like a Norman Bates-level psychopath.
@Crip Dyke and @bluecat – You have made my morning, thank you. 😀
And about this –
– it seems like he’s trying to translate “Suck my dick, hur hur” into purple prose, and it doesn’t work. It sounds like ethics is choking corruption with a stick (ethically, I’m sure).
Wow…. just….
I think I need to take a shower after reading that. Just… just…. ick!!!!
Is this a collaboration between Hartiste and Zombie Lovecraft?
Repugnican hypocrisy on display, as igno-right attacks Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for allegedly lying about her upbringing (she went to an up-scale high school)… and for dancing… and for having the nickname “Sandy”….
This is the same ‘pugnican bunch that voted for a “self-made billionaire, successful businessman” who got a million-dollar loan from his father to get started, and who went bankrupt four times in six tries, who bragged about doing well off his bankruptcies, bragged about increasing his wealth by stiffing his employees and sub-contractors.
They’re apparently also upset because there’s a video of her dancing in high school… I guess you can’t be in congress if you danced… now if she’d committed sexual assault, why, that’d be different — she could be a supreme court justice, then!
And that nickname!!! OBVIOUSLY she’s trying to make herself sound “more like a ‘murrican”… I mean, where do you get “Sandy” out of “AleXANDra”??? Not like Rafael “Ted” Cruz….
Yeah, about that dancing:
https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1081234130841600000
Whoever it is, it’s someone who doesn’t understand the distinction between “I went out there and killed” and “I went out there and died.”
What the heck, that is some weird ass screed.
What happened in E3 2017 that was different to other years? Opening it to the public as well as journalists? If I recall correctly a lot of publishers weren’t happy about it, not because of some “Anti-SJW agenda” or whatever but because it made the venue so chaotic.
Heck, it’s why Sony aren’t even at E3 for the 2019 conference! Score one for ‘gamers’ I guess?
I sort of want to know if One Angry Gamer was kicked out from he 2017 conference because, after paying hundreds of dollars for nothing much relevant to him, he felt entitled to “confront” some female game journalists.
There are a lot of gamers that just want to go see all the big announcements and stuff, yeah. E3 is mostly a marketing event, and some people just want to see the spectacle.
The thing is, E3 press passes were a joke for years before this. Anyone who really wanted to go could get a hold of one. So this big ‘victory’ that this guy is getting his prose all purple over is really just E3 making official what had effectively been the case for a decade.
I wanna go and see all the people in costumes! Oh, wait, that’s ComicCon….
I don’t understand why he thought that was such a big deal. What was he expecting to happen as a result of the public visiting E3? I mean, I have visited Gamescon and I don’t really feel like my visit affected anything in the games industry.
Isn’t calling yourself “One Angry Gamer” a bit of a self-own? To pretty much anyone outside Gamergate, it just sounds like “One Cranky Manchild”.
@bekabot:
So, Louis C.K.?
the lactating foyer is good, but my favorite is the udders that drip, first, through a sphincter, and THEN, through “curdled lips.”
. . .
wat
(also, let’s not overlook the fact that an oligarchy is being stabbed through the heart.)
Somebody’s taking “ethics in gaming journalism” way too literally.
(further nitpick: “lodged” means embedded or stuck. It’s a stationary act. You don’t “lodge your way down” something, unless the orifice of corruption belongs to a python).
I love this awkward and boring clause:
It’s like reading town planning erotica.
I would totally read town planning erotica!
Now, I admit that my industry knowledge is a couple of decades out of date, but back in the ’90s, E3 was essentially an industry convention. While I never went during my time as a game designer, most of my colleagues did.
That…is brilliant.
And now I want to write some.
“As Angela looked over the traffic planning schedules, she began to realize that the timing of the lights at North Monroe and East Bradford was going to make things hard. Very hard.”