Influence is an unruly weed; it grows in whatever directions it wants to.

From Imagine If Everyone Who Tried to Write Like Choire Sicha Had His Emotional Integrity by Freddie deBoer.  The line I focused on:

Influence is an unruly weed; it grows in whatever directions it wants to.

The whole context.

It’s often been said that if there is anything like a default prose style for the internet, no one has influenced it more than Choire Sicha, the former Gawker editor and Awl founder and current New York editor. This may not sound like praise; the default style of the internet is pretty damn annoying. But the point is not that the average style really mimics that of Sicha but that it’s a warmed over photocopy-of-a-photocopy of Sicha’s voice. For many people his run at Gawker was what defined that website, and from my recollection when he founded the Awl with Alex Balk he evolved that style into something more mature and quiet, which is what we should hope adults do over time. People try to mimic him and come up with something like superior disdain, but I no more blame him for that than I blame Quentin Tarantino for bringing us Boondock Saints. Influence is an unruly weed; it grows in whatever directions it wants to.

Another observation on a different topic.  My emphasis added.

You know how in that awful Johnny Depp Willy Wonka movie, a kid tells him her name and he says “I don’t care”? That was a very effective demonstration of a stunning failure to understand a literary character. Roald Dahl’s Wonka is indeed remote and cold and strangely unhappy to see the children that he’s let into his factory. But there’s a sense of meticulous manners to Wonka, something I would associate with… old money, maybe? A propriety which engenders respect for others when respect is given. The Willy Wonka of the book would never say something so crass to someone who has just introduced themselves, even someone as annoying as Violet - not just for her, but also because it would be beneath him. We’re finding, in modern life, that when we leave aside conventional manners we aren’t left with some emergent order of mutual validation, but rather with an ethic of self-aggrandizement, an ideology that tells us that we always come first.  If old formalities were all for show then at least they engendered a performance of respect, which might have inspired an affection for the real thing. I would so much rather someone be polite to me than they try to validate me. I assure you that this fits into this essay somehow.