new village

[Fetdaniel]

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.?)

[Chakravanti]

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]

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.

[Asmodeus]

I enjoy misusing colons; especially semi colons.

Isn't it also normal behaviour when trying to get along with people or around people we like to affect their mannerisms and way of speaking? Clearly someone who refuses to post in a similar 'regional' style as everyone else is either intent on not fitting in or deliberately being offensive (knowing subconsciously that people dislike people who are different.)

[XkrikX]

this thread=Guide how to stop a grammer nazi

[Chakravanti]

this thread=Guide how to stop a grammer nazi

He should have known better than to try to troll trolls in an unmoderated forum.

[niltrias]

I enjoy misusing colons;

That, sir, is a scary statement.

As many have probably noted, I quite enjoy talking about grammar. I think that the "grammar nazis", however, confuse the prescriptive rules for formal presentations with the descriptive rules for ordinary conversations. Your average forum post is much more similar to a conversation than it is to a thesis, and attempts to moderate the discussion as though everyone were writing a thesis on "The above post is ass-stupid" are...ass-stupid.

When engaging in dialog, the most important thing is not that your comment be grammatically perfect, but that it be intelligible to the person with whom you are conversing. Failing to do that is in my opinion the only grammatical sin you can commit, in conversation. I doubt there are any best-selling novelists you could find who do not have multiple sentences that are not grammatically correct, but they succeed in communicating with their audience, and hence...get rich.

Translation affords a particularly illuminating example of this. Often, in order to correctly convey not only the meaning but the subtext/context of a situation, it is required that the grammatical rules of the target language be broken, in a way as that would be understood as similarly as possible to the broken grammar and/or non-standard dialect of the source language. For example, the Kansai dialects "ariehen" is often translated as "it aint possible."

In ending, I hate apostrophes, because what is the point of omitting letters if you are going to replace them with another character? Keep em or lose em, I say. And I have recently finished a bottle of wine, so I am going to go away now. heh.

[Fetdaniel]

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.

Of course you're not stupid, i'm just worried that I might be just as psychotic.

[Fetdaniel]

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.

Yes its indeed possible and meaningful to discuss the functionalistic aspect of treating strangers badly, using cues such as language and other features of the habitus. I believe this is true too, but its hard to know not only the scientific validity of the theory but in this case also the significans in this given situation. I think that the quite accepted description of cultural groups is that they define themself not only trough similarity but dissimilarity with other significant groups. This explain subgroups, which is a hot topic when regarding the internet medium. Everybody recognises l0lspeak for example and its quite possible it spawned from a subgroup, which would further explain why it is disliked by many.

Anyway to my actual contribution to this quoted topic. The form of the text and its grammar is important on the internet since its all information we get, which is much less that what we get when meeting someone IRL, where we in contrast get more information than we can process. But humans are clever and we essentially make ourself more sensitive. But not so clever after all, how many here haven't seen a flamewar because of someone being touchy about the spelling or other concieved semantical cues like capital letters? Semantics and context are in essense the largest part of daily communication, and why wouldn't it "strive" to be like that on the internet too?

And as the quoted post suggests, motive means very much too. It's "valid" with your motive sometimes to deliberately misunderstand someone or throw poo sometimes, if the effect is in line with your motive. And most importantly if you sense a bad motive from the poster..

Most importantly, the ability or effort to try and explain this cause and effect shouldn't mistake this an ethical approval. On my part it's quite the contrary.