The word police.

Yesterday I said I'd give a talk on the 'graphic novel' without using the actual words. That's my strategy for avoiding some of those clots who inhabit the subculture of comic books and who are eager to argue about the meanings of words at the drop of a hat. Such was the nameless clot who arrived in my comments box two days ago and served me a 221 word defintion of the word 'graphic' in a confrontational way, and when he refused to sign a name to two subsequent comments became the first person to be ejected by the bouncers here at campbell.blogspot. The bar had to be closed down after that. Apologies to anyone who wanted to throw in their two cents, not leastof all hayley campbell who emailed me to say: "what a fucking twat." It's a good job I threw the sap out before h.c. started on him, that's all I can say.
I suppose other areas of human endeavour also have their nitpickers and self appointed civil servants who make sure that everything is kept in order, and that none of this is unique to my own chosen field. However In a perfect world I would walk down the street and people would say: 'there goes Eddie Campbell, a man with some interesting notions.' But what happens is that a bloke gets on his cell-phone and says, "I just saw Eddie Campbell, the graphic novelist."
"The what?"
"The graphic novelist."
"What's that?"
"Can't you just Wiki it?"
" uh,... okay... thanks for roning."