Ed. Note: Moments after posting this letter, WTB? received a comment that chastised us for making negative remarks. Please let us know if we have failed in our mission to educate by adding your own comment.
Whats this bug
Location: Florida
November 5, 2010 4:24 pm
I was just wondering what kind of bug this was. I got home from school and it was under my shirt??? But I have never seen one before.
Signature: Dont make no diffrence
Five Banded Tiphiid Wasp
Dear Dont make no diffrence,
We surely hope you were not sending this email immediately after your English class because there is no evidence of grammatical retention. In the interest of contributing to your knowledge of science and your appreciation of nature, we researched your request and we have determined that this is a male Five Banded Tiphiid Wasp, Myzinum quinquecinctum, which you may verify on BugGuide. According to BugGuide, the Five Banded Tiphiid Wasp is: “A slender, shining black wasp, with yellow crossbands. Males are more slender than the females and have an upturned black hook at the end of the abdomen. There are 5 yellow bands on the abdomen of the female (the second is broken in the middle) and 6 narrow, more regular ones in the male. Both head and thorax are marked with yellow. Legs of the males are strongly yellow, but they are reddish in females. Wings are brown.”
I like This
I would like to discourage WTB from making negative remarks to its fans, especially school children. We do not submit our questions to be criticized for poor grammar. I would think WTB would ENCOURAGE people to be curious enough about insects to feel free to come here without fear of public humiliation.
With all due respect, we do not feel that there was anything negative in our identification response and it is difficult to publicly humiliate someone who decided to self-identify as “Dont make no diffrence”. We feel strongly that care should be taken whenever something is committed to the written word, especially when the communication is being submitted for publication. We generally do not edit our reader’s letters, nor correct the grammar. We try to uphold a standard of communication and open dialog. We feel that we have critiqued rather than criticized the shortcomings in the querent’s use of the English language. Perhaps you are privy to information that we overlooked in the original communication, but we cannot be certain that a child sent the email. We are firm believers in lifelong learning, and many students are adults. Anyone who is studying should be open to having mistakes identified so that they may be corrected in the future. If “Dont make no diffrence” is a child, the child needs to learn to appreciate the beauty of language and how to use it correctly.
Obviously your querent is not a regular reader or he/she would know not to sign his/her question that way since you would be all over it like …. a mantis on a moth. Moreover, I’m not sure what “dont make no difference” to him/her, the signature or the bug identity.
“We surely hope you were not sending this email immediately after your English class because there is no evidence of grammatical retention.”
Wow! What bug crawled up your pants and bit you?
I’m with bugman. We don’t know if this was submitted by a child, and even if it wasn’t it should have had the proper written word.
Isn’t that what the child is in school for, to know the proper grammar and know the difference between don’t and doesn’t?
If no one spotted it, it’s not proper to have two negatives in a sentence.
IMO this wasn’t criticism, just a slight critique of their sentence structure.
I think anyone that cannot make the effort to at least be polite when asking for help from a website deserves a grammatical kick in the backside at the very least. If it is a child then the parents deserve one as well. Given the arrogant tone of the nom de plume I’d think more likely a teenager that has never learned respect for anyone. A sharp reprimand I think was well deserved.
Reminds me of the premise of Stephen Fry’s Kinetic Typography: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7E-aoXLZGY
I believe that the chastisement of grammar was justified.
Reading something like that, written that poorly, is painful.