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  • LAVA Moderator: Shinji Ikari

Pet Peeves v. u mad?

Illyria said:
I have absolutely no idea what this means.
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Ever hear phrases that begin with something like "America thinks. . ." "Britain obstructs. . ." or "Japan uncovers. . ."? These are creative fictions, abstracting from the concrete actors who have the ability to actually do or perceive things or hold opinions.

ebola
 
alasdairm said:
is it that hard to say "i'm sorry. i need to focus right now. would you mind not talking?"

alasdair
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For some, yes, it is. HOW one says those words is much more important than the words themselves, and for many people, those words are awkward and difficult to say without coming across the wrong way.

Also, the statement you suggested is a lie. He isn't busy, he just isn't interested. What happens then if someone else in the room suddenly starts talking to the OP about something interesting, and the OP suddenly no longer "needs to focus" and starts listening to the new speaker. The OP will look bad and the situation will be awkward.

Besides, the OP has a valid complaint, which is what the pet peeves thread is all about: The OP wishes people would pick up on not-so-subtle non-verbal clues that the topic of discussion is of no interest. The occurrence (and possible repeating occurrence) of the event itself is peeving regardless of the steps taken or not taken to discontinue the continuing of any particular occurrence.
 
Fjones said:
Also, the statement you suggested is a lie. He isn't busy, he just isn't interested.
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in which case he can tell the truth and say "i'm sorry, i'm not interested. would you mind letting me get on uninterrupted?" (unless of course he's not actually sorry in which case he can omit the apology in the interests of veracity) :)

my pet peeve is people who would rather suffer and complain about about a problem than solve the same problem.

even more odd is that, very often i find, the solution actually requires less effort than the continuation of the situation. why on earth would somebody do that to them self? why indeed?

:)

alasdair
 
alasdairm said:
in which case he can tell the truth and say "i'm sorry, i'm not interested. would you mind letting me get on uninterrupted?" (unless of course he's not actually sorry in which case he can omit the apology in the interests of veracity) :)

my pet peeve is people who would rather suffer and complain about about a problem than solve the same problem.

even more odd is that, very often i find, the solution actually requires less effort than the continuation of the situation. why on earth would somebody do that to them self? why indeed?

:)

alasdair
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Fair point. Though I have to dock you partial credit for "them self."
 
^ oxford's new american dictionary says it's fine: themself
The standard reflexive form corresponding to they and them is themselves, as in they can do it themselves. The singular form themself, first recorded in the 14th century, has re-emerged in recent years corresponding to the singular gender-neutral use of they, as in this is the first step in helping someone to help themself. The form is not widely accepted in standard English, however.
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alasdair
 
ebola? said:
It will be soon, though, insofar as "them" and "they" come to be fully accepted as gender-neutral, singular pronouns.

ebola
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Then we need to invent new non-genrder-neutral singular pronouns. At the risk of rehashing a tired subject, I have seen what can happen when plural pronouns are used in the singular sense. The results are nonsensical and often excruciating. Why can't we just invent new gender-neutral pronouns?

They
Them
Themselves

already have specific meanings in our language. It is not a good idea to attempt to use them as singular merely because we lack genderless pronouns.

"The police told them that their case was weak" Imagine that sentence in which the "them" refers to multiple people listening to the police officer, but the "their" refers to a single person. Confusion abounds already, and that is a basic example. Imagine an entire paragraph or story written like that.

Fjones said:
Then we need to invent new non-genrder-neutral singular pronouns. At the risk of rehashing a tired subject, I have seen what can happen when plural pronouns are used in the singular sense. The results are nonsensical and often excruciating. Why can't we just invent new gender-neutral pronouns?

They
Them
Themselves

already have specific meanings in our language. It is not a good idea to attempt to use them as singular merely because we lack genderless pronouns.

"The police told them that their case was weak" Imagine that sentence in which the "them" refers to multiple people listening to the police officer, but the "their" refers to a single person. Confusion abounds already, and that is a basic example. Imagine an entire paragraph or story written like that.
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Oh, and since I am sure someone will suggest "replace those pronouns with proper nouns to avoid confusion," I will preemptively reply with this:

That kind of defeats the purpose of pronouns. Try taking a news article and replacing every pronoun with a proper noun. The results are painful to read.
 
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fj said:
Then we need to invent new non-genrder-neutral singular pronouns. . .Why can't we just invent new gender-neutral pronouns?
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Unfortunately, this isn't really how language works. Speech-innovations tend to be built from slight modifications of already available syntactic and semantic material, many times by 'happy accident'. These types of constructions are more likely to spread rapidly through speech communities than linguistic particles invented ex nihilo.

You're welcome to give it a try though.

fjones said:
I have seen what can happen when plural pronouns are used in the singular sense. The results are nonsensical and often excruciating.
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Really? When? How so?

"The police told them that their case was weak" Imagine that sentence in which the "them" refers to multiple people listening to the police officer, but the "their" refers to a single person.
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In real life, we rarely engage single sentences in isolation. In fact, I would argue that a rich contextual backdrop is necessary for any statement to have meaning. I think that this example is likely to have been preceded by something like, "And how strong is the defendant's case?"

I guess it will be on newspaper editors to avoid writing confusing headlines. :P

ebola
 
Fjones said:
Interesting. I guess you and I interpret this part differently:

"The form is not widely accepted in standard English, however. "

(Emphasis added)
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for a long time, the idea of a human flying or a white person marrying a black person was not widely accepted. i understand both are common now.

:)

ebola said everything else i would have to say (but better than i could).

alasdair
 
alasdairm said:
for a long time, the idea of a human flying or a white person marrying a black person was not widely accepted. i understand both are common now.

:)

ebola said everything else i would have to say (but better than i could).

alasdair
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Come on Alasdair, this is nonsense and you know it. The point you made in your first sentence could be use to justify ANYTHING. I'll acknowledge there is room for discussion here, but merely pointing out that times change hardly qualifies as a cogent argument, or even an argument at all.

Ebola, you asked

"really? When? How so?"

I will dig through my archives to find one example that will demonstrate the problem. It may take time though. I am not sure where it is.
 
Pet peeve: When people continually contradict others in a vain attempt to seem more intelligent.
 
Fjones said:
I'll acknowledge there is room for discussion here, but merely pointing out that times change hardly qualifies as a cogent argument, or even an argument at all.
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given something as fluid and evolving as language, it's a perfectly good argument. you can agree to disagree.
Illyria99 said:
Pet peeve: When people continually contradict others in a vain attempt to seem more intelligent.
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your pet peeve is fjones? but he's so cute when he gets mad. and he gets mad a lot.

:)

alasdair
 
alasdairm said:
you can agree to disagree.


alasdair
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Damnit! I am boxed in. This statement is my Kryptonite. I am forced to agree with the original statement, or I am forced to agree to disagree with the original statement. Either way, I must agree with something. This situation is most disagreeable to me.

Anyway, well-played.

alasdairm said:
your pet peeve is fjones? but he's so cute when he gets mad. and he gets mad a lot.

:)

alasdair
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I didn't see her specifically refer to me?

Maybe she was talking about you:)

Hey, people can say what they want, but the pet peeves thread was a boring thread that rarely got any traffic until I got involved with it, at which time it became one of the most popular threads on BL.

I then disappeared for a couple of years after certain silly restrictions were placed on the types of posts that would be allowed in the thread, and it returned to a boring thread that gets little traffic. Hell, the same thread is still running from 2011! We used to go through a 1000-post thread every few months (and only 250 of those 1000 were mine).
 
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Fjones said:
...the pet peeves thread was a boring thread that rarely got any traffic until I got involved with it, at which time it became one of the most popular threads on BL.
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I see that you're not burdened with an excess amount of modesty. ;)
 
One of my major pet peeves is when someone (and this can be any website, not just here) posts huge blocks of words, without using paragraphs...I don't even bother trying to read through that shit.
 
"Noids" as a term for "synthetic cannabinoids"...so bad...it's the morphological unit that means "is in the diffuse category of", not the part of the word that specifies what the thing is. An analogy would be if we called spider-like creatures ("arachnoids") "noids".

ebola
 
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