The important thing is that we must agree about, not if, but how much we hate grammar nazis. Nothing personal.
That and Chakravantis post.
(Im not sure it's a good sign I agree with him this often.?)
XkrikX wrote:this thread=Guide how to stop a grammer nazi
Asmodeus wrote:I enjoy misusing colons;
Chakravanti wrote:People hate me because I'm psychotic not because I'm stupid. Despite making an ass of myself quite often it's not uncanny to agree with me on many things.
Snorri wrote:Long post: skip if not interested
It appears that many animals are wired to be hostile to others whose communication indicates a regional variance to theirs. Birdsong, for example, varies ever so slightly within species over a distance, and when a bird from some distance away strays into new territory the other birds use that difference in its song to determine that it is a stranger -and thus genetically dissimilar and they will shun it or mob it or otherwise exclude it. In people this takes the form of feeling uncomfortable, hostile and superior to people who have an accent, or whose communication shows they come from another culture. The main purpose of this instinctive hostility seems to be to establish separate breeding pools -it creates pockets of genetic diversity which increases a species' overall survival rate.
Of course an individual's instinctive level of hostility can be encourage or discouraged by what they learn as they grow up. It's easy to teach someone that people who use the word "whom" are snooty and pretentious, or that people who misuse the semi-colon are quasi-literate morons who are wasting bandwidth and should be driven from the forum.
So one of the many meta-messages in our forum posts is the answer to the question whether the poster is from a like or an un-like culture. It's not just a matter of what the words mean. We indicate a lot of things such as how competitive or quarrelsome we are, we try to claim different roles and the status that goes with them and we try to locate similar individuals to ourselves. This particular post, for example, could be taken to be simply the factual output of some information. But at the same time depending on the person reading it I could be trying to claim status: "I am smarter than you and lecturing you!" Trying to make peace: "This is a complex subject that can be experienced in many ways. Perhaps all the posters in the thread have valid points." or it could be a subtle joke.
The way I interpret it is that when someone signals discomfort with another person's writing, they are conveying the information that they feel the poster is unlike them and they are not supportive of people they consider un-like. But that too is a valid communication. "You are making me unhappy by writing in a different cultural style!" is no less a valid forum post than: "I think there should be much more player conflict in this game!"
Sometimes a message is pretty near completely incomprehensible, simply because the poster is really terrible at written communication in English. When the response is a harsh negative, that is not so much hostility against a foreign culture, using the writing in the post as a means of tagging the poster as a foreigner, as hostility against someone who doesn't have basic skills. This is even more common than variance in language used as a tool for discrimination. "If you can't drive, get off the road!" But of course the only way for someone to learn to drive is at the wheel of a car. Discrimination of this type is frequently considered justified.
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