Do you know what I thought when I read his first post? Wow, English probably isn’t this guy’s first language. Other posters? They just mock him. To a new poster who seems to be legitimately looking for advice. But how could they know English wasn’t his first language, you might ask. They could have fucking asked before they started mocking him. The irony? I think most of the posters who mocked him would be offended if they heard someone mocking another person’s accent. No cognitive dissonance there, people? You’re doing the exact fucking thing.
“To a new poster…” is a sentence fragment, and you don’t mock “to” a poster - you just mock him. And it should be “But how could they know English wasn’t his first language?”, you might ask.
There is a reason Gaudere’s Law originated on the SDMB, you know.
Perhaps I’m getting cynical in old age, but I am suspicious of people whose very first post on a message board is to ask for advice about some deeply personal issue. There was at least one person who repeatedly created accounts on the board seeking advice about personal issues; seemingly trolling for sympathy.
Realistically, I don’t think that the problem is with his English as his way of explaining his situation. It’s not just poorly translated/punctuated, it’s disordered.
Overall, probably not a candidate for the forum in the long term (if he’s real).
It’s probably a bit more complicated. I suspect those people criticizing his grammar thought “troll”, and that the bad english was a ruse. When someone pops in here out of the blue with some personal problem, “troll” is not an unreasonable assumption to make-- it happens pretty frequently. Once you’re at “troll”, all bets are off as to how honest the poster is being about anything.
Having said, those types of comments belong in the Pit, and I agree with the moderator action taken to stop the insults.
In addition to these excellent points, I have a few more about the concluding sentences of the OP’s diatribe:
I think most of the posters who mocked him would be offended if they heard someone mocking another person’s accent. No cognitive dissonance there, people? You’re doing the exact fucking thing.
The last sentence of course makes no sense. He may have meant to say “you’re doing the exact same fucking thing”, but that’s wrong, too. I don’t have a problem with “exact same” being unnecessarily redundant as redundancy in a noun phrase like that can have expressive value, but I do have a problem with an adjective modifying another adjective in that particular fashion*. In any case, what was actually written is grammatical gibberish.
Working backward, the second sentence is also stupid. Cognitive dissonance is a specific well-defined behavioral syndrome that means something very different and much more specific and complex than just inconsistency or hypocrisy.
The third to last sentence is equally stupid. An accent is just a regional or cultural variance in pronunciation; it has no objective right or wrong. The written language can be objectively non-standard relative to its formal grammar and lexicon, and in the more extreme cases such as the post that was being mocked, properly characterized as “wrong”. And the mocking was, incidentally, largely motivated by the perceived trolling, not by malice.
Thus, the OP is refreshingly true to the poster’s name. He deserved to be mocked for being needlessly annoying and stupidly unperceptive.
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*Not really, in colloquial discourse. But it’s amusing to itemize how the OP is rife with mistakes.
To which remarks I will add that posters would rather respond to an assumed troll with mockery and contempt rather than just ignoring it. Anything to show how fucking clever you are*. Ooh! Ooh! I discovered a possible troll! I’m so smart! I can mock the bad grammar and spelling! And the rest who pile on in a similar vein. That whole recipe thing, useful as it is for other reasons, would not be necessary if you lot could resist the temptation to show off. But you can’t.
*Yes, that is a sentence fragment. So sit on it.
Do you even have any idea what Gaudere’s Law is?
The OP was not correcting anyone’s grammar or spelling, you moron. He was criticizing the people who were doing that. You were 180 degrees off the mark; not surprising, but still notable.
I thought, “Damn. Did someone leave the dipshit faucet running?”
This guy is about the fourteenth half-literate turkey with relationship troubles we’ve had this week. If his situation is accurate - that he asked his girlfriend to come live with him in a different country, and then he sent her home again for a few weeks because he doesn’t have his shit together - then I think the posters in that thread are being far too kind to him.
If he’s just the latest woe-is-me-troll - which is what I suspect - then the mods are being far too nice to him.
Either way, to hell with him and his half-assed attempt at having a rational discussion.
Yes, but we don’t do the recipe thing in IMHO or MPSIMS, only in the Pit where you’re allowed to call a troll a troll. Outside of the Pit, we have to content ourselves with mocking someone’s spelling and grammar. If we posted recipes, we’d get modded for threadshitting.
I completely disagree. First of all, one can contrive to criticize any post, of any kind, on any subject, as some kind of self-serving exercise in pomposity if one wants to work at it with enough acerbic cynicism. But I’d rather make and judge posts from a less severe and humorless perspective and a more utilitarian or at least entertaining one.
Sure, if we were striving to make this board the epitome of polite society, above all else and at all costs, the right approach to a nonsense thread would be to ignore it. Instead, some of us choose to deal with some of the funniest or trolliest nonsense in creative ways that we hope will be modestly entertaining. It’s called parody, and it’s a respected literary tradition. IOW, I think perhaps you’re taking this all way too seriously.
You’re quite right, John. But since we’re in the Pit, the mindset I had when replying to Roderick Femm and the OP was explaining why we mock the grammar and general idiocy of trolls in the Pit (ETA: particularly with the mention of the recipe thing). Outside the Pit there’s really not a lot you can do, which is why I usually ignore the more idiotic trollery altogether. As I recall, I didn’t participate in that thread at all. I was defending what we do here. If I ran the place I’d be inclined to give more slack to the critics and less to the trolls, but I don’t. The reality is that it’s usually very predictable from the first few posts if a new join is going to be unproductive and probably not last long.
That evades my main point, which is why folks don’t just ignore the trolls. My working theory is that they can’t pass up the opportunity to show how clever they are.
All that’s a fancy way of saying you want to be able to show off regardless of how much it perpetuates nonsense threads to hang around on the first page much longer than they otherwise would. You think I take that seriously? It’s only annoying, but once in a while I feel called on to call out this behavior amidst all the self-congratulatory pseudo-cleverness. By all means, carry on if that’s what you like to do.
Just to be clear, I was in no way referencing your post here. And while I agree with the mod action in that thread, that doesn’t mean I thought silenus’ post wasn’t funny, and that I didn’t chuckle when I read it.
In one instance you’re mocking someone because of how they talk. They have an accent because English isn’t their first language.* In the other, you’re mocking someone because of how they write. They’re writing like that because English isn’t their first language.In both cases, you’re mocking someone for not conforming to a set of rules (grammar vs. pronunciation). How does grammar having a more “objective” standard mean you’re not doing the same thing?
Also, mea culpa on the misuse of cognitive dissonance. Want to know something that makes it even more stupid? I have a BS in Psychology.
I hope the posters combing through this post for grammatical mistakes are having fun!
*As my OP was about people whose first language isn’t English.
