I agree, this is after all a writing forum. In a debate or discussion you have to act or pretend to be more civilized then your opponent, if you going to disagree with a person's PoV of the subject at hand, then you must never act openly dismissive or hostile but be more subtle in calling the person a idiot.
Really not the message I was going for.
I consider that a naive viewpoint.
That a word only has a single meaning, independent of context. For example, I doubt you meant that the academic study of life sciences influences someone's personality or controls people's brains.
Nope! Unless you've got some other assumption feeding into that conclusion that I've missed or that you didn't state:
And it's possible for different speakers to interpret the context in a discourse differently, leading to misunderstandings not based on idiocy or disregard for the meaning of a word. This is my basic point. [Edit: It seems like you're rejecting the concept of ambiguity in discourse. Are you?]
You misinterpreted my statement. (Does this count as ironic, given what we're discussing?) I meant that it was naive to assume that misunderstandings based on the usage of a word could only arise if "something [was] very wrong," - a vague phrase which I admit I made certain assumptions about. It seemed to imply that you believed that the meaning you intended for a word, including all of its implications, would always be clear to a reasonable person of at least average intellect debating in good faith. That's the viewpoint I meant to call out as naive.
I feel that when referring to a specific person of known gender, most of the so-called gender neutral terms currently available in English lose their neutrality. I'd be fine with "Valette lost their train of thought" (but would avoid it because of Valette's well-known preference), but not "Valette's a great guy." In the case of a specific individual of known gender, 'guy' indicates a male to my ear.
I assume you're coming to this conclusion because you believe the context in this case was only interpretable in a single fashion? If so, this is part of what I see as a naive approach to discussion and ambiguity. If not, I apologize and confess myself confused.
This is where I'd prefer to let Valette clarify, rather than try to put words in zeir mouth. By the way, I also suspect that "affect" is being used differently than you're understanding it.
He didn't call you an idiot, though, unless you believe that a computer is magic, or that someone's personality isn't based solely on their brain.
"I will clip these two tickets."
One of my favorites is "I shot the man with the gun."
"He ran outside to chase after the cat with a broomstick in his underwear" is my personal favorite ambiguous sentence.
It's not a tactic.
Ah. So you were accidentally being a jackass, instead of intentionally?
Just out of curiosity, what do you suppose my position to be?
Officially, you seem to insist that you don't have one. But behaviorally? You have clear favoritism, based upon use of more hostile language toward certain posters than others, and a tendency to defend certain posters but not others based upon no notable virtue other than you seeming to like them better.
You haven't actually answered my question, and I asked because I feel like you think I'm arguing a point when I do things like point out what one of my favorite ambiguous sentences is. That post had nothing to do with any argument that may be going on; I just like ambiguous sentences.
I was trying to save you time by clearing up what I suspect is confusion on your part, but sure. Take all the time you want, I'm in no hurry.
But favoring posters isn't a position, its just a bias. Those are different things aren't they?
That would be me
And that is misrepresenting what I said. What I said was either the people who use them are trying to seek attention and make themselves appear as something special (most of what we see on tumblr, basically, with this these folks) or the people who sincerely believe this shit have a mental illness of some sort, given their brains by all accounts are abnormal and don't function the way they should that they feel the need to refer to themselves with special-snowflake pronouns.
Nah, doesn't read like that to me, I think he expressed him self just fine. Referring to multiple people's actions collectively is not that unusual a thing.
Conversations drift..that isn't really being a jackass to me. This isn't a formal debate.
