I am, once again (in the spirit of the Spirit of the Board), going to attempt the impossible. I am going to try to describe what we thought [that's the elitest "we" for those following along at home] we had here at one time and would like to find our way, somehow, back to.

I am, for the moment, going to call it the magisterium -- as I work my way through this, and it may take several posts, I hope to find a less loaded term. For the moment please allow me to define it thusly:

our magisterium of words was a domain where a form of teaching held the appropriate tools for meaningful discourse and resolution, concerning our shared language. In a sense we were elitist, coming in with all kinds of expertise in various areas, offering up what we knew, or thought we knew, about our common (and sometimes not so common) language, offered up from the point(s) of view of our jobs, our avocations, our heritage, our tastes, or just the ways in which we live our lives from day to day.

We were not without our foibles, even early on. The pedantic tone that sometimes arose turned folks away, I know, but we made it quite clear that we didn't want to be just another "chatty" forum -- as has been mentioned here at some length, those are rife in Networld. (All of this we tried to capture to some extent in our FAQs, but who reads that stuff.. and we couldn't capture it very well anyway.)

Now, just to close out this first post on the magisterium, I want to emphasize one thing. This magisterium should NOT be confused in any way with "majesty", which comes from an entirely different root. The distinction I want to make, and this is the real reason I chose the word, is that what we were (are?) about is the teaching of each other all of the useful and/or interesting things we know, or can find out, about this language that we profess to love.

questions?