Didactic Thumbs (Pedantry Corner)

[Ninety-Three]

Definitionally, I should think that mansplaining can only be performed by a man. Personally I'm in favour of abandoning the word altogether, as misuse has caused its meaning to degenerate to the point of near-uselessness. Just like "troll" has degenerated from "to deliberately incite bad feelings in someone" to "to mess with or deceive someone in any way", mansplain seems to have moved from "A man patronizingly explains to a woman, about a subject he knows little of or less of than the woman" to a point where it is often used as "A man explains anything to a woman".

[Merus]

The thing about mansplaining is that it's trying to name an action when it's the intent that's offensive, which is bound to cause drift.

[Ninety-Three]

I hate hate hate the phrase "I'll get right to it: I want blahblah...". If you were getting right to it you would just say "I want blahblah...", prefacing your statement with a phrase that communicates no information is the opposite of getting right to it. Why do people do that?

[Twig]

Because they don't expect everyone to be a pedant about every little thing they say.

[Ninety-Three]

They're not just opening themselves up to pedantry though, they are ostensibly trying to get right to it, and yet they're undermining that with the phrase "I'll get right to it". Why do people engage in this self-defeating behaviour?

[Badfinger]

They're not just opening themselves up to pedantry though, they are ostensibly trying to get right to it, and yet they're undermining that with the phrase "I'll get right to it". Why do people engage in this self-defeating behaviour?

 

Because people usually don't, or they know people expect them specifically to not do so.

[Twig]

Because, realistically, very very very few people give enough of a shit about this minor incorrect manner of speaking.

[Mawd]

Because they're dying to make a preface before their point first and they're hoping you won't switch off before-hand since they've baited that a major point is coming soon.

[Ben X]

Twig, this is the pedantry thread. Responding to someone's post with 'that is pedantic' is about as useful as saying "I'll get right to it" instead of getting right to it.

[Twig]

He asked the question, I just answered.

 

To be pedantic.

[James]

I hate hate hate the phrase "I'll get right to it: I want blahblah...". If you were getting right to it you would just say "I want blahblah...", prefacing your statement with a phrase that communicates no information is the opposite of getting right to it. Why do people do that?

Probably because in the given context their audience would expect some amount of beating about the bush, and to launch straight into the main matter without some sort of introductory phrase would seem awkwardly direct. Like, if you just go up to people and say, without introduction, what you want, that's a bit weird. Possibly even rude. At least by introducing it with an acknowledgement of the directness, the person saying it demonstrates that it's not that they just don't care.

Or maybe it's just to draw attention to how direct they're being, because they're really pleased with themselves.

[Ninety-Three]

He asked the question, I just answered.

 

To be pedantic.

 

To be pedantic, you didn't answer my question (except insofar as any possible statement can be considered answering any possible question). "People don't expect others to be pedants" isn't why people do it any more than "I don't expect to get hit by a car" is why I cross the road.

[Twig]

Well it is a valid and most likely correct (although not consciously correct, just like in the sense that it's not the sort of thing people expect to be picked apart for) answer!

It's just also not the answer you were looking for.

[Merus]

Saying 'I'll get right to it' is more correct than asking your question, because it's a conversation opener. Starting the conversation with the question you want answered is telling your conversation partner that what you want out of them is more important than what they might get out of the conversation. It's inconsiderate of other people's needs, which is rude.

 

Acknowledging that you're skipping the valuable social calibration of small-talk lets your conversation partner know what to expect from the conversation: it's going to be quick, it's going to be information exchange, and social bonding isn't needed or desirable.

 

You rarely say 'I'll get right to the point' to your family, for instance, because you don't need to send social calibration signals to them.

[brkl]

My best contributions on this forum are when I shut up and let other people say what I want to say, but better.

[James]

Yeah, Merus seems to be on the same page as me. These kinds of little social interaction nuggets might not seem logical in isolation, but they're often a logical response to social expectations that exist.

I would even go so far to say that I don't think the phrase is inaccurate as such. Very rarely does language work in pure absolutes. Saying you'll get "right to" something is a relative term. It means "without significant delay". What constituted significant delay is not universally defined, and will vary from context to context and person to person. I imagine the kind of people who say "I'll get right to the point" consider the time it takes to do so a significant delay. There's all sorts of implicit meaning in language that leads to a lot of flexibility in how it's used. I get a bit annoyed when people act like it's more correct to ignore that, given that it's essential to how pretty much all human communication works.

Not that I ever use the phrase myself.

I hope that doesn't come across as too aggressive.

[eot]

I can't figure out which of these sentences is correct. I googled them and they have about the same number of hits (it's just an example sentence)

"One one of those people who love(s) ..."

3rd person singular or plural?

[Twig]

One loves.

 

You can remove the prepositional phrase to make it easier to figure out how it should go.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I can't figure out which of these sentences is correct. I googled them and they have about the same number of hits (it's just an example sentence)

"One one of those people who love(s) ..."

3rd person singular or plural?

 

Depending on the exact context of the sentence I think it's "love".

 

If I'm reading it right, because it's "people who love". "people" is the subject of that verb so it has to conjugate as third personal plural.

 

This is definitely how it should work in a sentence like this: "A weeaboo is one of those people who love anime". It's "people" that "love anime", not "one". "one" just happens to be among the "people who love anime".

[Ben X]

I think I say "loves" but "love" is actually correct.

[Ben X]

Originally from slack, here are some genuine questions I have for people who hate "spoiler culture":

 

How do you define "spoiler culture"?

If someone is going to watch Sixth Sense or Planet Of The Apes  and are not aware of the endings, do you think it's totally fine for you to tell them before they watch the movies?

When Homer Simpson yells out the Empire Strikes Back twist as he walks past the queue of people about to see it, are ​they​ the assholes for being annoyed?

Does "spoiler culture" only refer to those who are unreasonable in their aversion to spoilers, meaning that it is therefore a bad thing by definition?

[Ninety-Three]

Originally from slack, here are some genuine questions I have for people who hate "spoiler culture":

 

When you say "Hate spoiler culture" do you mean "Hate the way people tiptoe around spoilers" or "Hate the way people are always spoiling everything all the time"? Because without context, it's so ambiguous a phrase I can't tell which side you're talking about.

[SuperBiasedMan]

In this context spoiler culture is the culture of avoiding spoilers. So if you hate that culture, you think people should care less about avoiding spoilers and Ben wants to know how people define the excessive aspects of the culture they hate.

[Ninety-Three]

I don't hate spoiler culture, but I think people generally care about spoilers too much. I saw Sixth Sense knowing he was dead the whole time, and it was still great, I saw Star Wars spoiled and it didn't ruin the movie.

 

I think spoiler culture fixates on the wrong stuff. This quote came out of a discussion on the Overthinking It podcast and sums it up nicely:

 

A spoiler for The Wire isn't "Omar dies", it's "The institutions are still broken and nothing changes".

 

I watched Sixth Sense knowing that he's dead the whole time, and I still loved that movie. The spoiler that would have made it worse for me is "He finds peace by helping a little kid solve a haunting". Similarly Star Wars 7 wasn't ruined by knowing

Kylo Ren kills Han. If you really want to spoil Star Wars, tell someone "It's basically Ep 4 all over again, it hits all the same beats: New Luke, new R2D2 carrying new secret info, new Death Star that does the same things as the old Death Star..."

.

[brkl]

I knew all that going in and it didn't bother me.