Local Author Struggles to Determine if Satire or Satirical Best Tag for His Humorous Vocal Story

Local author, Daniel R. DeMarco, Ph.D. struggled Saturday to determine if he should append the tag "satire" or "satirical" to his story Argan Oil Chronicles Part VI - Yep, You Read That Right, Part Six. Unless You Can't Read Roman Numerals In Which Case You Did Not Read That Right. In Any Case This is the Last One. For Now. Dr. DeMarco said the following in a written statement explaining his confusion. "Anyone who reads any of my stuff, which currently sits at around 10 or so people per month, knows how passionate I am about precision in language. This applies to all aspects of my writing, including so called 'tag' selection. I say so-called because on every other website, and by standard convention, what Vocal calls a 'tag', everyone else calls a keyword. I guess the editors at Vocal felt that if they called them keywords that would imply they were actually findable using common search engines like Gooogle.com. Instead they can only be 'found' using the internal Vocal site search engine which absolutely freakin sucks by the way. In any case, when I publish a story to a given community, I want the tags I select to accurately reflect the content of said story. Is it weird that I throw up in my mouth a little bit everytime I type or say the word community? That's exactly how cheesy and stupid the entire idea of communities actually is. So stupid that I throw up in my mouth even thinking about it. Weird, right? Or, maybe it is the concept of community in a general sense that I find so distressing. Similar to the concept of sharing, it feels like a slippery slope to communism to me, but I digress. I recently pulled together the sixth and final part of the series collecting my most popular and hilarious stories featuring argan oil and was in the process of publishing it in the Humor community when I encountered the head scratching conundrum of whether to choose satire or satirical as a tag.

In cases like this I typically turn to my good friend the dictionary to help me, but in this instance it was of little aid. While satire was defined as the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues, satirical was defined as containing or using satire. Clearly my Argan oil story fit both definitions, and it would seem that any story one could possibly imagine that was satirical in nature would be satire, and conversely, any writing that had or used satire could be considered satirical. But, why then include both options as tags? Given the obviously high intelligence level of the editorial team at Vocal, I can't believe they would not have not given such a decision a great deal of serious deliberation. Some of them almost certainly have college or even graduate level degrees in fields as varied and challenging as English, English literature, contemporary Engish literature, ancient English literature, future English literature and creative writing. With academic chops like that there is no way that decision was not one hundred percent intentional and not just a stupid oversight by little Timmy Jackson the Vocal intern who was given the job of selecting the tag words as the final part of his unpaid summer internship project co-sponsored by the graduate department in English with the colle of Arts & Sciences at Montana State University. MSU English is a recognized global leader in the field and graduate students in the program regularly go on to high paying and rewarding careers in diverse fields such as library science, fast food drive thru cashiering, and janitorial engineering to name just a few. In any case I am stumped. Satire or satirical? or would wit be better?" The statement was signed Dr. Daniel R. DeMarco - Everyday Junglist.