This blog entry was prompted by the Formula 1 Blog entry "Vox Certatus: Playing Favourites", which was about favourite teams and drivers and why we thought them so. Initially I took the question at face value, providing a somewhat lengthy response covering Force India, Hill, Fisichella and... ...Montoya. With stating why I disliked the latter, I inadvertantly kicked over a hornet's nest.

When next I visited, I cleared up a small misunderstanding concerning how I'd worded one particular phrase (or so I thought), but then the discussion drifted in a way I hadn't expected. F1 Kitteh asked me:

So you would rather have ‘scripted **’ than ‘verbal abrasiveness’? 

This is the question which I intend to answer here, since the "essay" proved too long for the comments section of Formula 1 Blog.

In my opinion, there are three kinds of verbal abrasiveness. One of them can be a good thing. Another is generally a somewhat bad thing, but can be very bad depending on the particular circumstances. The third one is always very harmful, and unlike the second one it harms everyone, not just the speaker.

To indicate these, here is my personal sliding scale of verbal abrasiveness and scripting, from best to worst:

Situational, justified verbal abrasiveness <- scripting/situational unjustified verbal abrasiveness <- persistent verbal abrasiveness

 
If someone is liable to be sharp-tongued only in specific situations and there appears to be good reason (e.g. they've just had a really stupid steward's decision against them), that would be better than any form of scripting.

An unjustified sharp-tongued incident tends to lead to biologically scripted behaviour, which is about as accurate as behaviour scripted by the powers-that-be (i.e. not very). This is why I rate behavioural and psuedopolitical scripting on the same level. I don't expect those involved to give the explanation for their behaviour as it is frequently obvious in context, but without some reason for being abrasive, one often finds that common sense and logic go out of the window alongside the politeness. I would consider Scott Speed as an example of someone who washed out of F1 partially because there was confusion over whether his situational abrasiveness was justified or not. I thought it was (from what I heard of it) but Franz Tost differed in opinion.

It's the people who are always abrasive, who cannot seem to go five minutes without denigrating someone or pointlessly attacking some slight, who are the least accurate and the most likely to drive me up the wall even reading their words. Most people like that end up putting off their sponsors and mechanics early in the junior formulae and therefore never get seen by the talent scouts, let alone anyone in F1.

Nonetheless, a few do drift into F1. Some people really like such people, possibly because they are so different to those around them or because they can identify better with them. Personally I cannot identify with them at all because I am accustomed to people who have a reasonable (though frequently imperfect) concept of keeping a civil tongue in their heads. People who don't get mad or dismissive at absolutely everything. And it's this which made me dislike Juan Pablo Montoya and Eddie Irvine. However good they may have been as drivers, as people they disappointed me and their ways of talking about others was the primary clue for me to come to this opinion.

(Incidentally, I prefer truthfulness - whether that's Mark Webber's brand of bold statements or Kamui Kobayashi's calmer candour - over any of the above).  

Ultimately, the limitations of particular drivers' attitudes, personalities and methods of thinking have a large influence on their enduring support base. Performance comes and goes but character tends to stay stable - most of the time. Different people tend to resonate with different drivers according to those characters, unless they are the sort of people who support based on performance (be that success or underdog status) or who support more abstract entities such as teams. Even then, teams have group cultures which invoke the general principles discussed here.

Speech is one of several doorways to the revelation of character. It's one of the more accessible ones to the general spectator, especially when spoken in places where journalists have taken the trouble to record the results. Look closely enough and the clues are all there.

Which drivers really think a given way v. those who are claiming it due to conditioning. 

Which drivers really respect - or even like - another v. those who pretend to respect another v. those who have dropped the pretence.

What each driver is hoping for in F1.

Which ones are likely to be around in a strong enough position to achieve those hopes.

Some signals in speech are more obvious indicators of character than others. A habit of persistently abrasive speech is pretty obvious. I just didn't realise it would be so controversial.

Script Frenzy Update:  20 pages of prose, which should become 40 pages of script when formatted. I feel confident about this challenge.

Today's entry is going to be a relatively short one (cue relief from LCMB's readers ;) )

Before I found out about the F1 blogosphere, or even the F1 fora, I used to use Yahoo! Sport's portal to keep up-to-date with the news. Even afterwards, it was good for brief checks of what the hot topics were before plunging into the detail stuff from sources who were more detailed/closer to the truth/more opinionated [delete/augment as appropriate]. It's been a while since I've done that - Twitter more or less took over the role of telling me what the hot topics were at a given time - but this afternoon I wandered back to Yahoo! Sport for nostalgia's sake.

I was disappointed at what I saw.

The fact that it's a news portal, rather than a direct source of news, meant I was unsurprised with the... ...variable quality of sources used. It was the lack of quality control that truly got to me.

Take this example. The headline indicates it's a rumour, but such efforts to distinguish the type of item are the extent of its strengths. The story is attributed to F1 news site Crash.net in the top-right of the article, Spanish daily sports newspaper Diario AS in the middle of the article and the distinct impression that GMM is involved at some point as a middlesite. The Diario AS article which appears to have started all this is much longer than the versions at Yahoo! and Crash, and the style of abbreviation has all the hallmarks of GMM on it.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the GMM controversy, it is an information-trawling agency that charges money to send metric tonnes of small items of varying levels of veracity, frequently using an online translation service to help make its quota (currently 8-25, but changing every so often). It's the F1 data equivalent of fast food - some like its convenience but many consider the lack of value-added information, rumour quotient, lack of indicated differential between types of item and certain other of its actions unhealthy. Whatever your opinion of GMM, it is proper etiquette for a site to mention a site if used as a middlesite. Proper "breadcrumbing" of information sourcing enables people to find out by what process the information has arrived and what changes may have been made to it along the trail.

Making matters worse is the lack of care in the sentences. This carelessness has been imported from Crash.net, but that is no excuse. Why is "newspaper" abbreviated with an apostrophe when the correct abbreviation doesn't have one? Why have online translator artefacts such as "the Collins" been left? They act merely as symbolic eyesores and serve no useful purpose.

Worse still are such confusing suggestions as "Tonio Liuzzi's management has made contract with Hispania Racing" when the headline itself suggests the two sides are merely in talks. The offending sentence is the very first one in the article. What, exactly, is a reader unaware of the true situation meant to make of this? They might think something's been signed, they might not - but they will think the reportage was rather clueless. Not great for a site that presumably expects people to come back and read more of its articles.

It is a relief to me that the F1 blogosphere and reputable journalists like Joe Saward have taken over as the primary sources of F1 internet information exchange because if they hadn't, computer-using F1 fans would be banging their heads on the wall in frustration every time they logged on.

PS. If I have made any blatent blatant spelling or basic sentence construction mistakes in this entry, feel free to point and laugh at the irony ;) .