Scott Eric Kaufman — An English Professor Who Doesn't Know Sh*t About English

One of the most interesting things about Scott Eric Kaufman is that he doesn't seem to know anything about the things in which he writes. Oh sure, the prick's good at laying down the demonic snark while surfing the conservative 'sphere for tidbits of attack material, but when it actually comes to writing quality content ... well, the guy's pure fail. I was already thinking about this when I noticed SEK's stuffy mini-"review" of Leo DiCaprio's Inception — the most noteworthy thing of which is that SEK and his wife actually walked out on the film. I'm planning to see the movie this weekend, so I wasn't going to offer my comments on whether it merited that kind of antipathy, although I was tempted to just post a snarky piece hammering Scott Erik Kaufman for his hopelessly effete left-wing university-ish elitism.



But now I'm glad I held off. It turns out SEK's initial review didn't go over so well with some like-minded effete types, and he's written an update, "Bit more on Inception." And while I might be persuaded that one of SEK's critics is on the money when he implies that Scott's an unsympathetic childless asshole, I'm content to simply indicate SEK's non-typo completely FUBAR ignorance of the word "flak."



As you can see at the first sentence of the post: "I’ve taken a lot of interesting flack for my non-review of Inception ..."

Actually, SEK means to say, "flak." It's a word that leftists apparently have a hard time using, which is easy to explain, given the left's ideological hostility to the military. In context, you might say I'm "giving him a lot of flak" for his stupidity — and boomerang smears, since he likes to attack opponents as "functionally illiterate." It's too good, really, for nearly every time SEK's trolled my site for some jollies, he's ended up making himself look lame with massive errors at the original post. And like clockwork he always comes back with some lame excuse for why an English professor shouldn't actually be required to write proper English, but in the case of "flack" I imagine he'll just have to take his lumps. And since Ann Althouse is a frequent target of SEK's idiotic trolling, I'll let her take him to the woodshed.



See, "Flak" (where Ann hammers Josh Marshall, another Ph.D. know-it-all, who misused "flack" in 2007):

From me, you're going to first catch flak for writing "catch flack."

“Flak” is WW II airman’s slang for shells being fired at you in the air, so to catch a lot of flak is to feel in danger of being shot down. However, most civilians these days have never heard of “flak,” so they use “flack” instead, which originally meant “salesman” or “huckster.” You need to worry about this only if you’re among old-time veterans.

When you're showing off your expertise about fighting a war, you ought to get your war imagery right. A flack is a press agent. Hacks -- "writer[s] hired to produce routine or commercial writing" -- know more about flacks and not so much about flak, but they need to try not to let it show.

Gotta love it. A law professor schooling a history Ph.D.



But even better is schooling an alleged professor of English on English language usage. Can you say epic fail? And the references to teaching "English" are quite loose, since SEK's apparently teaching courses on "Manga" and the literary origins of films like The Last Airbender. My kids could probably lecture on that stuff, although they aren't stuffy Ph.D.s who write half-baked movie reviews on films on which they've walked out on.

Well, at least SEK's no longer claiming to have a "Doctorate of Philosophy of English."

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