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| Beginners, don't run away, please! |
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| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: wilfred on February 24, 2018, 06:39:27 am ---Has this thread gone a bit off the rails into the territory of reductio ad absurdum? --- End quote --- That phrase doesn't mean what you think it means. Reductio ad absurdum is where you prove or disprove a proposition by demonstrating that it can be reduced to an absurd conclusion. e.g. "There is no smallest positive rational number, because if there were, then it could be divided by two to get a smaller one." --- Quote from: wilfred on February 24, 2018, 06:39:27 am ---I'm not offended by the F-word or any words that readily spring to mind. Rather than define a list of offensive words I would just prefer the F-word not be used in the beginners section. It is not because there may be children or highly sensitive souls present. It is because I think replies that use the F-word are never as helpful as those where the writer has thoughtfully crafted an answer that avoids it. So what offends me is the writer did not think the forum audience worthy of choosing to avoid using it. I think less of them for it. Look at all the forum members who post and maintain a moderate respectful tone and be guided by their example. As a guide I would say using the F-word once every 5000 posts would be reasonable. Or not at all. --- End quote --- I think it's a bit rich calling for a moderate respectful tone immediately after posting a remark that indicates the exact opposite of respect: "I think less of them for it." |
| mikerj:
--- Quote from: Lightages on February 24, 2018, 05:11:24 am ---I used the words I did because I was upset and wanted to express my complete disgust at how people act like assholes and get into pissing contests that swamp the original OP's question with childish behavior and pointless bickering. --- End quote --- As much as I agree with your sentiment, acting like an asshole yourself isn't going to bring about a solution, and means you are far less likely to be taken seriously. Bad language rarely, if ever, reinforces a point and it certainly doesn't help to make the forum a nicer, friendlier place. |
| CatalinaWOW:
My grandfather, a crusty, tattooed ex-soldier, fireman and policeman, always told me that profanity was the crutch of the verbally crippled. Without totally agreeing with him I think there is a lot of truth in his comment. Whenever I am tempted to use profanity it is a warning to me that I might be being overly emotional, or too lazy to precisely express my opinion. |
| paulca:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on February 24, 2018, 05:12:18 pm ---My grandfather, a crusty, tattooed ex-soldier, fireman and policeman, always told me that profanity was the crutch of the verbally crippled. Without totally agreeing with him I think there is a lot of truth in his comment. Whenever I am tempted to use profanity it is a warning to me that I might be being overly emotional, or too lazy to precisely express my opinion. --- End quote --- Abso-fucking-lutely. |
| Cerebus:
--- Quote from: CatalinaWOW on February 24, 2018, 05:12:18 pm ---My grandfather, a crusty, tattooed ex-soldier, fireman and policeman, always told me that profanity was the crutch of the verbally crippled. --- End quote --- As is often the case with folk wisdom, that turns out not to be true. Swearing tends to correlate with a broader vocabulary and with higher intelligence - some details here but a Google search for "Swearing and intelligence" will yield a host of sources. Complaints about swearing/profanity tend to act as a marker of perceived social or moral superiority. The most frequent swearers tend, in my experience, to be at one of the two extreme ends of the social scale - either working class or very upper class - cf "swearing like a trooper" and "swearing like a lord". The people in the middle like to think they are both socially and morally superior to the former, and morally superior to the latter. So concern about swearing is just a old form of "virtue signalling" but has no merit as an actual indicator of moral, social or intellectual superiority. You can have as broad a vocabulary as possible, as much power of self-expression as you like, as great rhetorical powers as Winston Churchill, but at the end of the day nothing else in English has the expressive power that is possessed by the single word "Shit!". |
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