Re: apply to NM? ha!
On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 01:43:32AM +0000, Helen Faulkner wrote:
[snip]
> 3. If anyone says something to you that is insulting or upsetting or
> offensive, you are possibly better off just ignoring it than trying to
> argue with them. Remember 1 :)
3.5.
A lot of nuance gets lost when communicating over the Internet,
especially in a multi-culture, multi-language environment.
Tongue-in-cheek humour, irony, subtle jokes, or local variances all
stand a big risk of everything between becoming totally incomprehensible
to becoming rudely insulting.
Also, most subcultures tend to develop a language of their own, a
with its own internal jokes, idioms, etc. For instance, all of my geek
friends (and I presume most people here?) know, that if
I tell them to RTFM, it's not because I wish to insult them, but to
remind them that there is a manual-page for that
command/function/whatever. My mother would probably not understand
that however, and she'd very likely be quite upset to see output
from dict).
Similarly, there's quite a difference between a coffee table discussion
where I tell my buddy "Fuck off!" when he reads me an awesome article
from today's paper, and the "Fuck off!" newbies sometimes get on an
IRC-channel when asking the wrong question.
The problem is that to alleviate the problem completely, we'd either
have to stop people from writing what they think (mind control),
or have everyone convert to new speak (double plus bad).
[snip]
Regards: David Weinehall
--
/) David Weinehall <tao@acc.umu.se> /) Northern lights wander (\
// Maintainer of the v2.0 kernel // Dance across the winter sky //
\) http://www.acc.umu.se/~tao/ (/ Full colour fire (/
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