Pineapple on pizza is a good example of where purists just need to stop and examine themselves.
If people want pineapple on their pizza, any decent bystander should want those people to have pineapple on their pizza, not try to stop them or disparage them.
If people can’t tolerate others hving self-determination on their dinner plate, how are they ever going to allow it in other less trivial contexts.
I want you to have the things you want to have. Even if they are things I don’t personally want.
Pineapple on pizza is an example of “joking indignation”, nobody seriously thinks that it’s bad for others to eat it, it’s just such and outrageously strange thing that one is compelled to joke about “crimes against nature” and stuff like that.
Same as people who puts on socks and shoes in the blasphemous sequence : sock, shoe, sock, shoe. Or save-scummers (the worst of the worst!)
People have very strongly held opinions about continents - how many there are, where exactly the boundaries are, and which continent a given country or region is assigned to. In this schema, even oceanic islands must belong to one (and only one) of the continents. Rather than accept that the particular categorisation they were taught was to some extent arbitrary, they will argue that any other categorisation is wrong.
This is just one example of how we insist on the rightness of the particular version of reality we were taught in school. We were rewarded for getting it right; it became part of our identity. I am sure this is a large part of why people are so hostile to the idea of Pluto being removed from the list of planets. They learned there are 9 planets, they learned to recite the names in order of distance from the sun. It is not okay with them that there are suddenly 8 planets.
I would not be surprised if this was behind some of the hostility to transgender people. 6 continents! 9 planets! 2 genders! Anything else is wrong!
So…I sometimes do this.
For example, awhile back our Internet went down, due to some issue that Cox had. But, of course. that left our WiFi signal unaffected. My wife asked me what was going on, and I said “Cox is out.” She replied that “WiFi was working.” I agreed, and said that the WiFI was fine, we just didn’t have any connection to the Internet. She replied “Oh, so you mean the WiFi is out” (you can see where this is going). I tried to explain that WiFi and Internet are two different things, but by that point she was getting angry.
I suppose that the reason I do that is for a couple of reasons - To help troubleshoot problems in the future, and to make it clearer when asking a question. I’ve had numerous occasions where someone will say something like “my computer is dead.” When I ask what that means, they will say “well, it goes “bonk” when I click on this button.” I try to explain that that is far from “dead.”
Funny, but I went around the same Wi-Fi vs internet thing just last week w very much non-techie GF. Then add in the interaction between mobile phone networks, airplane mode, and whether or not airplane mode switches off Wi-Fi too. And the idea you can have Wi-Fi on, but not be in range of anybody offering Wi-Fi, much less you having connected (and if necessary authenticated) to it.
The fact it works so seemlessly most of the time means folks can develop a very skewed idea of what’s going on under the hood. And only know of the surface layer they can see on their UI and touch with their controls.
Trying to get to common terminology that wasn’t overloaded with incorrect baggage was a challenge for GF & I too. We got it done, sorta.
I think a much higher proportion of people who like pineapple on their pizza are sick and tired of the “joking” criticism, especially by people for whom this is the only food-related gatekeeping they are engaged in. Like people eating vegan saag “paneer”.
It’s a matter of knowing your audience, some people will laugh and hit you back with some food preference of yours, some will be offended, of course you shouldn’t make the joke to a person you don’t know well, odds are that they are sick and tired of it.
Yes, exactly. Pluto is a great “benign” example of how shaken up people can get when the Universal Truths About The Way Things Are that they learned in childhood get challenged; but this also happens with more contentious issues, such as those involving sexuality.
Which is why the “lies to children” that are a necessary part of incrementally teaching them about a very big and complicated world really need to have a disclaimer attached every time. e.g. “Among the living things there are plants and animals and they are separate. (There are other kinds of living things too, but we’re not going to worry about them right now; maybe next year). For now we’ll talk just about plants and animals.”
Next week the kids won’t specifically remember the detail that there are living things other than plants and animals.
But if the kids hear the disclaimer after every simplified absolute statement, then over the whole of growing up, they’ll be trained to be a lot more receptive to the idea that categories, definitions, etc., are more complicated than they know and substantially always have details, exceptions, special cases and … that they don’t know about. Which they may learn about explicitly next year, or maybe never.
As long as that pizza is not for sharing, yes. Now- anchovies are a maybe, some people find even the smell nauseating. If eaten by yourself, go for it.
If someone does that in my sight, and they are a full grown adult, I just raise and eyebrow or shake my head sadly. But I wont say anything. If a kid wants ketchup on a hot dog- fine.
Technically- no, you wont find that in a pie shop, even those that sell meat pies. But that is the name, so no big deal.
Right- (side note, for a while Ceres was included in the planet list, before they found Pluto). I just explain this, that Pluto is way way smaller than we originally thought, and if indeed Pluto IS a planet, then we have at least 10 planets.
On the second thing- if an older person says “Someone born a male is a male, and etc” and are otherwise good on gay rights, etc- then I just do the head shaking thing, and chalk it up to age. I dont call them a TERF or anything. The important part is them accepting other LGBT+ rights. Not their old definition. And us older folks do have issues with remembering names, so be nice to us if we forget and use that “dead name”- just politely remind us.
The one that’s a hot topic in California right now is “That’s not an e-bike, it’s an e-moto”, in part because a state legislator introduced a bill that would require “e-bikes” to be registered as vehicles. The thing is, the spectrum of “two wheeled conveyances with electric motors” that one might colloquially call an e-bike ranges from bicycles with functional pedals and a motor assist not capable exceeding 20 mph, to essentially electric motorcycles capable of going 60 mph. The latter being the category that’s really an e-moto, according to many.
And I agree with them. There needs to be a distinction between the two kinds of electric two wheeled vehicles. I think the former category is a great alternative to cars for short trips, and under current California law are legal to ride on bike paths. And I would totally support requiring registration and licensing for the latter category, just like motorcycles (From what I understand they’re currently technically illegal in CA). Calling them all “e-bikes” just muddies the waters and creates confusion between the two.
There’s a guy in our town who advertises that he can take off some device that keeps the top speed below some legal limit, beyond which the state requires registration and insurance (and a license?).
So basically you buy an e-bike that you don’t need to register and insure, but for $150 (or DIY by watching some videos on YouTube) you can convert if to something that can do 40mph.
I’m not really bothered by the difference between an e-bike and an e-moto. I think both should be allowed on bike lanes, but neither should be allowed on bike paths unless there is also a clear demarcation of what lanes are for bikes and which are for pedestrians. 20 mph is still fast enough to cause injury. Even the 10 mph of the casual pedaler can be dangerous, but the default of a pedal powered bike is to slow down and it’s going half as fast and it requires a certain commitment to even get out on the sidewalk so there were fewer of them to begin with.
“You could maybe work on saying what you want to say without using the most college level words you can come up with.”
“Well, I don’t do that on purpose either. A lot of time I’m trying to be precise. Words and phrases that don’t get used by people as often can sometimes be very exact in what they mean. Like latching onto an idea with a set of surgical clamps, you got a really precise hold. Everyday words get stretched to mean a wider range of things, because they get so much use. And they also, a lot of the time, they take on additional implications, a sort of package deal, and if you don’t want to include stuff that’s associated, especially if you’re trying to call those assumptions into question, you want a clinically detached kind of word. "
