So Steve's comment leads to some possibly fruitful ideas. The word itself is less the issue than the attitude it conveys, which is relevant to us as professional people involved in using and designing hardware and software.
Frequent usage does not cleanse the word of its history or offensive associations. Such logic should be unacceptable to serious people. Lots of people beat their wives; frequency of wife- beating doesn't make it right or acceptable. It's a human failing. The only acceptable measure is conformity to a rule--and not mob rule. In this case casual use of this offensive term proves not that the word is appropriate but that increasing numbers of people don't care whether they offend others or not. Just as they don't care to take the trouble to speak proper English. Often now you hear "like I do" rather than the grammatically correct "as I do." It betrays a slacker attitude, and it stands out like a sore thumb when you travel abroad, as I do constantly. It's easy to spot the Americans -- they dress like slobs, are mostly overweight, and speak broken English. It's pathetically sad, and I'm so sorry for my countrymen. So that's why I speak up when I see bad habits. Someone has to. Specifically on the subject of language: it is a medium of communication. The rule has to be "what maintains/improves communication?" If you don't follow rules about meaning, and grammar, and syntax, eventually you end up being mutually incomprehensible. Look at what happened to Latin: people were sloppy, but sloppy in different ways in different areas, so you ended up with the mutually incomprehensible Romance languages. So I point to the use of the rude word as the sign of a bad habit: not caring about precision, about meaning, about other people. This bad habit carries over into other domains of life, like dress as I said, or like private and public finances. Look at the present American financial catastrophe (worse is coming): it came from a sloppy attitude toward paying one's own, and one's country's, bills with real income. The justification for paying by borrowing was precisely "everyone does it." That's fatal. Never utter that nonsense reason again :) This is no joke. My daughter has attended schools in many places in the world, but mostly Asia. We've seen it up close; the competition is fierce and American slackerdom (as seen for example in educational attainment) is leading to ruin. (It's no better in England where she finished high school.) If you don't believe me, spend some time at a student cafeteria at Stanford, Cal-Tech, Princeton or Harvard. Determine the percentage of those eating there who have epicanthic folds. On Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:17:11 -0400, STeve Andre' wrote: >On 08/02/11 03:32, Jeffrey Race wrote: >> Indeed the vulgar sexual slang was very inappropriate >> for a professional site>> >> --Original Message Text--- >> From: Ray Bay >> Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 18:20:49 -0600 >> >> Inappropriate use for this site... >> On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 6:13 PM, Jeffrey Race<jr...@attglobal.net> wrote: >> <http://www.camblab.com/nugget/slang2.pdf> >> >Jeffrey, > >I am thinking that you live outside the US, and are therefore not >quite in tune with popular communications today? > >Suck has gone from questionable to common usage, denoting >when something (or someone) is bad, horrid, in need of change >or improvement. > >I suspected this was the case, it's changing usage, but I was a >little surprised when I was at a library and found a problem in >the card catalog software, and talked with one of the lead >librarians. She hadn't seen the problem that I described, but >looked down and said "this system really sucks". This was a >60+ year old woman, who chose the right phrase for the system >she was forced to use... > >--STeve Andre' > >ps: She owned a ThinkPad. > > >_______________________________________________ >Thinkpad mailing list >Thinkpad@stderr.org >http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad _______________________________________________ Thinkpad mailing list Thinkpad@stderr.org http://stderr.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/thinkpad
