Manchester United?
If my location isn’t clear or specific enough for you, then you are cordially invited to deal with it. Sideways with a lukewarm tomato.
Was there really any need for foul language?
If it weren’t, you wouldn’t have felt the need acknowledge chowder just there.
Just for you E D.
Just stopped back in to show off my location.
You’re so two months ago.
But DC is so much easier to type than the District of Columbia.
As for the VA - well, it sure as hell isn’t called Vermonta.
Venezuela?
That’s not a state. Yet. You haven’t been reading W’s plans for the summer, have you?
Consider yourself Whooooshed 
Wow - I don’t use a smiley and you think I am not joking?
W’s plans for the summer? Invade Venezuela and make it a state?
The lesser spotted double whoosh, I think…
:smack: :smack:
Huh. I figured you might come up with an counterexample that makes you seem less crazy. Guess not. A reasonable response may have been, “of course all abbreviations are not a display of hostility, but some are, such as: …”. But I guess that runs the risk of making you look rational. As is, I’m expected to believe you really and truly think the worst of someone’s motivations for writing “CA” instead of “California,” which makes you a complete and total loon.
Your nutbar interpretation of two completely neutral letters does not constitute hostility on my part.
Alright, I’m a huge lame-ass for doing this in the Pit, but I reread my response and it seems a little more vicious than was called for. I still think you’re a nutbar (I mean, really, reading hostility into abbreviations is weird), but I think the combination of “crazy”, “not rational,” “nutbar”, and “complete and total loon” might have been a bit much.
That would not have been a reasonable response at all, as it completely misses the point. The abbreviation itself is irrelevant. The latent hostility is from the fact that it’s exclusionary.
It would be like going out to eat with a group of English-speaking people, and a few of them decide to hold a side conversation in their native tongue, French. This is rude to the non-French speakers, and I would also say there’s a latent hostility to it. In fact, I might even go so far as to use “latent hostility” as a definition for rudeness.
A simpleton might come in with both guns blazing and scream about how ridiculous it is to characterize speaking in your native tongue as rude. But the thing that social retards like that need to understand is that there is a thing called context. Not everything in the world is a binary black & white dichotomy. I’d probably be wasting my breath, though, as internalizing that fact is one of those social skills, and we know how lacking the general readership of the sdmb is when it comes to social skills.
Well, then where we differ is whether or not we consider the optional “location” field “part of the conversation.” In my opinion, it’s more akin to one of the French people wearing a t-shirt that says, “Embrasse-moi. Je suis français”* and really not being concerned with whether or not anyone gets it, because it’s not important. Seems to me that the simpleton is the one who joins a group where the social norms clearly treat the location field as optional, unimportant and fair game for silliness and interprets that as hostility.
So “CA” is exclusionary. Is it even more exclusionary and hostile to simply leave the location blank, as I do?
- disclaimer: google translation. here’s hoping it doesn’t say “Kiss me. I’m a jelly donut”
Even though this thread dropped off the front page (again), since it ended with the above question please allow me to hopefully finish it off with an answer:
No.
Qui tacet consentit - silence implies consent. A blank Location field is not negative but passive and innocuous, a nonentity, does not bother me at all. I myself do not see latent hostility in oblique or playful Locations either. I am just repeatedly nonplussed glancing at them.
One more thing. Three posters (#39, 105, 106) changed ‘Location’ as a result (I’m assuming) of being swayed by the OP’s argument, and three (#205, 206, 207) changed theirs to goofs on Leaffan and Ellis Dee. Those latter three changes seem to be lingering, I notice. As of tonight they still have not changed back.
Ongoing literal repetition of witticisms, deliberate or inadvertent, can never be good if the object in view is to produce amusement. For humor, balance is needed between novelty and staleness but either extreme should be avoided. Familiarity with subject matter is required of an audience in order to understand humorous allusions, but the thing stirring some of the unsuitable reactions to these goof locations, I think, may be over-familiarity.
Part of the appreciation an audience experiences for a wisecrack is that pleasant sense of surprise and discovery at the moment, I’ll call it the sweet spot, in which unexpectedly juxtaposed elements – in this case locales in the mildly shocking and provocative phrases “Ellis Dee’s basement” and “Leaffan’s house” – become evident to that audience, in this case the SMDB reader.
But I fear that I, as part of that audience, may soon, in this and whichever other threads these three members post, encounter those clever goof locations one or more times too often to fully experience their intended humorous effect.
My recognition of the gag – my ‘seeing it coming’ – is now beginning to occur a few milliseconds before the magical sweet spot in which recognition should ideally take place in order for the humorous effect to be fully realized. I experience a peculiar displeasure in fact – a slight sinking feeling in my stomach (I swear) – which, for me, many times seems to accompany stale humor. This minor physical reaction may possibly stem from the fact that, in face-to-face situations as opposed to a message board, I many times feel called upon to exhibit some variation of (unfelt) non-negative reaction to strident oft-repeated wisecracks, for the sake of decorum, which I guess I must, at some level, not relish doing.
In humor wide fluctuations in the balance between novelty and staleness are indeed acceptable. Featherlou’s riposte for example (Post 144) to Silenus’ assertion that elements of this thread seem “childish” to him – she wrote, “I know you are but what am I?” – produced a chuckle from me. That line could not be older or more oft-repeated, and there can certainly be no purer example of inanity. Yet it is funny. If I should happen to encounter that very same line again this evening while reading, say, Bill Bryson’s Thunderbolt Kid (a real possibility), it would likely evoke another very similar chuckle. It is funny by definition. I laughed.
But neither featherlou in this thread nor Bill Bryson in his book would consider writing that exact same line again in their very next post or page, and then again, and then again. She does not enter it into the recurring Location or Signature fields of our posting template nor indiscriminately pencil it verbatim into all her posts whichever thread or forum they are destined to appear.
Similar precautions, so important for keeping humor fresh, have not been observed by the three posters using Location for goofing on Leaffan and ED.
Here’s a suggestion. One method of varying an old joke is place it in the mouths of new characters. The resulting incongruity of newcomers involved in the “old” situation may once again produce laughter. In fact, multiply the hilarity by altering noun, preposition, and object of preposition in imaginative ways: “Above Mark Ryle’s comprehension,” for instance, or “off the scale of Mark Ryle’s goofiness-quotient meter.”
Well, I might. 
Bill Bryson probably would too.