Greetings Economists, Hey JD that's interesting. I am so used to someone writing "huh" to me I just think it's normal, but I understand your reaction. I think that's a deeper issue with writing than the anecdotal frustration.
There are two components that come to mind; the strong feeling, and the miss-understanding. The strong feeling I think comes out of the deep commitment to your work that is reflected in that. On a more superficial level people driving cars (like myself) respond to traffic in strong ways because of the feeling it's life and death. Which is a way to say what a strong commitment is. So it's a sign of the value you place in economic thought which is a good thing in my view. In normal conversation face to face there is a great deal of back and forth banter between speakers to correct the message. There are a lot of formal tasks to writing to get past that problem of error generation in words. Yet the devil creeps in a lot with email. Functionally that is navigated by how we feel whether face to face or in email. In conversation we use 'feeling' to navigate errors in speech acts which happen maybe as much as forty percent of the time. The brain does a lot of filling in the blanks and meaning interpretation, especially with someone we are familiar with, but the other errors have to be gotten hold of by intervention and demands that are the petty elements of emotion structure. To me the imposition of emotions is a sign of the real human being doing their best in circumstances in which the best forms of writing text still lack error correction mechanisms ordinary conversation provides. Of course in ordinary conversation one can punch the objector in the groin with the toe of the shoe, but does that solve anything? :-) thanks, Doyle On Mar 18, 2006, at 8:06 AM, Jim Devine wrote:
I mostly get irritated when people don't understand what I'm saying.
