| 8:27a |
Personal note; weather...
There's a winter storm -- an ice storm, which is the worst kind -- predicted in our area, today through Tuesday. It's supposed to stay well north of us, but Weather has a tendency to be unaware of exactly where the county lines are. If you find me suddenly missing from the current discussion(s), chances are good that it's because of a power outage; in that case, I'll be back as soon as the mess is over... |
| 9:28a |
Linguistics; rudeness in e-language; metaphors...
I had asked you two questions:
How do you [you personally] recognize a comment in your LJ as being rude -- not obscene, not threatening, just rude?
And do you think that deleting a rude comment rewards the commenter?
You have been sending me excellent -- and fascinating -- answers to those questions. Not very precise answers to the first question; exceedingly precise answers to the second. Plus a bonus: You've been gifting me with detailed and informative descriptions of your own policies with regard to deleting comments that you identify as rude. Thank you.
The comments in which some of you have told me that your metaphor for your LJ is your home caught my attention immediately. I remembered that in the past some of you have referred to my LJ as my front porch, or my back porch. I knew those metaphors were all wrong for me ... I would never think of my LJ as my home, or as any part of my home ... and I sat down prepared to do a lengthy semantic feature analysis as a way of figuring out how I fill in the X in My LJ is a(n) [X].
Sometimes that's what it takes, and it's a lot of work. And then there are the other times, the very rare "Eureka!" times when you don't have to go through all of that and you just suddenly know what [X] is. This was one of those times. As soon as I started asking myself "When I'm in my LJ, where am I?", I knew the answer; I recognized the place in a matter of seconds, and that recognition answered a number of other questions for me that I've been puzzling over quite a while.
For me, the metaphor goes My LJ is the linguistics "common room" at UCSD. Where...
Day or night, you could always find people having absolutely enthralling discussions...
You were always welcome to listen to those discussions, even if you couldn't contribute anything useful...
You could write on the walls, and the ceiling, and the windows...
The people doing the discussing were native speakers of various different languages and members of various different cultures, so that things were often being looked at in ways that would never have occurred to you...
It was always safe to ask a stupid question; and although you were likely to be told that it was a stupid question, you could count on getting an intelligent answer...
There were no Forbidden Subjects, none at all...
The people doing the discussing were -- to me -- a bit terrifying, because they were such hypereducated and hypersophisticated nerds and geeks and techies, but the conversation was so splendid that I was more than willing to put up with the terror...
When there was a professor present -- which wasn't all that often, but did happen now and then -- everyone was scrupulously careful not to be rude to the professor...
When there was somebody present who was clearly totally lost -- which wasn't all that often, but did happen now and then -- everyone was scrupulously careful not to be rude to the Lost One...
I could always count on having a good time, and on learning something I hadn't known before...
I hadn't realized, until [thanks to all of you] I recognized this metaphor, how much I miss the UCSD linguistics department common room. And I haven't been there since the early 1970s, which means that I have undoubtedly romanticized it up one side and down the other over the intervening decades. But that's my metaphor for this journal, and its perceptual filter, and the source of its grammar. Eureka.
Enough for now... |