Saturday, December 8th, 2007

Time	Event
2:01p	Linguistics; rudeness in e-language... All the way back in a discussion we were involved in in May, bemusedoutsider asked this question: "To what extent, I wonder, does the deletion of a comment that's only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude -- reward the individual who posted it?" And dteleki responded with this comment: "The deletion leads the rude poster to conclude: 'Somebody did in fact read what I wrote.' 'Somebody was ANNOYED enough by what I wrote, to delete it.' If the rude poster was trying to get attention, or trying to cause annoyance, or both, then the rude poster is indeed rewarded by the deletion; how rewarded the rude poster is, depends on how much the rude poster wanted to get attention or to cause annoyance. If the rude poster wanted those results very much, the reward from the comment being deleted could be quite large; by comparison, having the rude post simply left in place, with nobody replying to it or referring to it or in any way acknowledging that it ever happened, could be extremely disappointing." Like bemusedoutsider, I wonder about this, and would be interested in knowing what you think about it. My own inclination is to agree with dteleki, but one of the things you [youall] have taught me is that my perceptions are often markedly different from yours. Given the fact that I'm so much older, and so much more Rural Southern, and so much more pacifist, and so much less tech-skilled, than the vast majority of you are, those differences don't strike me as surprising. Still, sometimes I'm unaware of them unless you point them out to me. So far as I can remember, the only comments I've ever deleted from this LJ have been of two kinds: (a) a single comment that I perceived as a grave danger to the privacy of the commenter; and (b) a handful of comments that have unquestionably been spam -- ads for ED remedies, for example, usually posted to my long-ago piece about how to get your Ozark neighbors to come get their cows out of your yard. I suspect that my reasons for not deleting a comment that I consider "only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude" are different from the reasons you might have for deletions in your own journals. I'm reasonably certain that my reasons for considering a comment rude are often very different from the reasons you would have for doing so. But I may be wrong about both of those things; heaven knows I've been wrong -- and often astonished at how wrong -- many times in the past. So ... I have two questions. 1. What -- for you -- are the characteristics that define a comment as "rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude"? 2. Do you agree that deleting a rude comment rewards the person who posted it? Over to you... (11 Comments | Comment on this)
2:10p	Linguistics; rudeness in e-language... All the way back in a discussion we were involved in in May, bemusedoutsider asked this question: "To what extent, I wonder, does the deletion of a comment that's only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude -- reward the individual who posted it?" And dteleki responded with this comment: "The deletion leads the rude poster to conclude: 'Somebody did in fact read what I wrote.' 'Somebody was ANNOYED enough by what I wrote, to delete it.' If the rude poster was trying to get attention, or trying to cause annoyance, or both, then the rude poster is indeed rewarded by the deletion; how rewarded the rude poster is, depends on how much the rude poster wanted to get attention or to cause annoyance. If the rude poster wanted those results very much, the reward from the comment being deleted could be quite large; by comparison, having the rude post simply left in place, with nobody replying to it or referring to it or in any way acknowledging that it ever happened, could be extremely disappointing." Like bemusedoutsider, I wonder about this, and would be interested in knowing what you think about it. My own inclination is to agree with dteleki, but one of the things you [youall] have taught me is that my perceptions are often markedly different from yours. Given the fact that I'm so much older, and so much more Rural Southern, and so much more pacifist, and so much less tech-skilled, than the vast majority of you are, those differences don't strike me as surprising. Still, sometimes I'm unaware of them unless you point them out to me. So far as I can remember, the only comments I've ever deleted from this LJ have been of two kinds: (a) a single comment that I perceived as a grave danger to the privacy of the commenter; and (b) a handful of comments that have unquestionably been spam -- ads for ED remedies, for example, usually posted to my long-ago piece about how to get your Ozark neighbors to come get their cows out of your yard. I suspect that my reasons for not deleting a comment that I consider "only rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude" are different from the reasons you might have for deletions in your own journals. I'm reasonably certain that my reasons for considering a comment rude are often very different from the reasons you would have for doing so. But I may be wrong about both of those things; heaven knows I've been wrong -- and often astonished at how wrong -- many times in the past. So ... I have two questions. 1. What -- for you -- are the characteristics that define a comment as "rude -- not threatening, or obscene, just rude"? 2. Do you agree that deleting a rude comment rewards the person who posted it? Over to you... (26 Comments | Comment on this)
3:14p	Linguistics; rudeness in e-language; cyberglitch.... I'm sorry about the duplicate post today. I sent the post early this morning .... and then the Net crashed in our area because [according to my ISP] "somebody cut the line between here and Fayetteville." When service was restored this afternoon, the post still wasn't there, so I sent it again. And now the two posts have different sets of comments. I could delete one of those posts and re-post its comments myself, with credit to the original commenters, but I'm afraid that I'd foul that up -- ungeek that I am -- and both posts would disappear. Or worse. I'd rather not risk it. (5 Comments | Comment on this)

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