Last October, "I started out with just debunking," he notes, from his own account, but thought perhaps he should become a finger-waggling scold as well, and registered PicScolder.
An Old Norse skald (yes, "scold" as well as "poet") might as easily trade formal insults with a fellow poet as recite lines about heroic battles; that's medieval slam poetry for you.
Americans could not stop paying attention to their home-grown "scold," as Lewis called himself.
Mr. Alford is very funny in describing his conversion from passive recipient of bad behavior to active if subtle scold, as when he points up the widening apology vacuum in modern culture by making amends to people who should by all rights be apologizing to him.
Maria Kowroski was an appropriately glamorous and woebegone Dorothy, with Savannah Lowery a believable scold as the stepmother, Jason Fowler as the loving adoptive father who dies too soon, and Clara Ruf-Masdonano amusinglysingly rotten Young Florence, Mabel's sister.
He doesn't appear to be as much of a scold as Pope Benedict or John Paul II.
