The written word as fetish

While I am liable to say almost any damned thing, I am very careful about what I commit to paper. Many others, you may have noticed, are not. Grammar, spelling, and capitalization rules are going by the wayside as we move into the almost exclusive use of electronic media. The sheer volume of verbiage is rising exponentially, but many of its producers are obviously unconcerned with whether a document will stand the test of time, whether time is reckoned in years or hours.
For example, a professor at my alma mater recently contributed a guest column to the local paper concerning an ongoing controversy I have been following in North Carolina papers and blogs. This wasn't just a letter to the editor, mind you, though that would have been bad enough, but an entire guest column under his byline. You would think that a supposed scholar would do a bit of fact-checking to avoid obvious errors that would undermine his credibility discussing a hot topic in a public forum. It was clear to any halfway informed reader, however, that he was almost totally ignorant of the facts of the case and made several outlandish (and, in my opinion, actionable) statements libeling the defendants. He was soon forced to retract that entire column publicly in the same paper, either by the public shredding of his half-witted and ill-conceived piece or by the prudent advice of counsel. Opine in haste, repent at leisure.
Not only does taking pains spare you embarrassment, it also shows in the end product. Mark Twain had it right when he apologized once to a friend for dashing off a long and rambling letter to him because he didn't have the time to construct a brief, careful one. You can tell the difference. Twain's letters still make better reading than most people's novels, and he's been dead for going on a hundred years.
With me at least there is a strong touch of fetishism in this worship of the written word. I speak as one who just spent two days cleaning an ink clog out my Montblanc fountain pen with meticulous care. I got the pen from my aunt Pree in 1989 as a high school graduation gift, and it still serves me well, though it clogged a bit on the way over here. A thirty-five cent Bic pen would do the job just as well, I suppose, but if it's worth writing well and I'm at home -- I'd never dream of taking it to work -- I pull out the old MB Meisterstück, which I keep snug in its slimline case in my desk drawer. Even if the rest of the document is computer-generated, my signature is worth the effort. At least I believe it is. Otherwise, why bother?
I understand the folks who don't give a damn, who dogear their books and (the horror! the horror!) write in them, who sign their name with whatever writing implement is closest at hand, and who think proofreading is for fussbudgets since it's the ideas behind the words that matter. These people are the Protestants of the word. For them it's the message that counts, not the trappings. I understand the sentiment and can't argue with that sort of results-oriented practicality.
Still, I remain an entrenched linguistic Catholic of the old school, gripping my fountain pen like a talisman and taking comfort in its heft and design as if I were an old Italian widow fingering her rosary.