Erik Reuter wrote:
>
> On Thu, Mar 28, 2002 at 09:23:54AM -0600, Julia Thompson wrote:
> > Hey, folks, could we refrain from using the F-word for the next 3 days,
> > at least? It doesn't bolster your position in most cases, and it causes
> > some folks to be less inclined to listen to what you're trying to say.
> > It might even cause someone who was inclined to agree with you based on
> > the rest of your post to disagree just on the basis of not wanting to
> > agree with someone who is being so crude.
> >
> > If you *must* use it, could you at least refrain from SHOUTING it?
> >
> > Thank you!
>
> Out of curiosity, does seeing a certain word REALLY cause you a lot of
> distress? Or was this missive just sort of a reflex action ingrained
> into you by a mother or grandmother or suchlike?
It's not the word so much as how it was used. Specifically, the tone.
In the first case, at least we were warned that the section it was in
was a rant, and it wasn't spelled out explicitly. It didn't do anything
to convince me that the position was a reasonable one, though. And if
the poster wanted to convince me of his point, that wasn't going to
help, and didn't do anything to make my opinion of the poster any
*better* than it was already, and in fact it hurt my opinion of him.
That opinion will probably recover to where it was before April is over,
but that's potentially a whole month of my discounting that poster's
position just a little. He was posting angry, and that's something of a
turn-off in an intellectual discussion.
In the second case, by the time my eyes passed over the word, the tone
of the post had been set -- insulting and vicious. That word just drove
the tone of that post home.
If you want to respond to someone, it's a lot better to hold off on
hitting <send> for *at least* half an hour if you've thrown a
capitalized obscenity in for emphasis, take the time to calm down and
decide if you *really* want to give that impression of yourself out into
a public forum.
> I've never understood why people seem to be so upset about that sort
> of thing. It seems to me there are literally thousands of things more
> distressing to worry about than that. Why let yourself get upset by
> such a trivial thing? Tolerance of other people's ways of expressing
> themselves is the way to go, I think.
As Jim said, screaming in that manner in an argument "generally means
you've probably lost you're intellectual detachment, and that it's a
good bet that the argument to follow *isn't* going to be a classic in
the annals of debating."
And he went on to add the general age of those who are actually
impressed by that sort of thing, and it's a LOT lower than the average
age of those participating in these discussions.
As for Erik's post on the uses of the word, in most of the cases,
substituting "screw" will work about as well; "screw" in and of itself
doesn't get screened as a cussword by any filtering system I've had any
feedback from; and there's something actually more forceful about
bringing to mind a potentially nasty and sharp piece of fastening
hardware that you can really cut yourself on rather than the boneless
organic mass I'd be more inclined to visualize with the word that was
actually used.
Now, the gerund which was actually used has no function other than an
obscene emphasis and an indication that you're not interested in
intellectual debate, but rather in letting the world know that you're
angry and don't care about much besides expressing that anger. That may
be useful for people around you in RL to know, so they know to get out
of your way and not set you off for a little while, but on an e-mail
list, there isn't as much point. There are more civil ways to handle
that sort of thing in e-mail. Calming down before you actually post is
a good one to start with.
Julia
