People are terrible

[white_hart]

Seen on the Internet in the last 24 hours:

1. On a blog post introducing a new knitting design: “I love this pattern, but I wish you’d designed it for a different weight of yarn as I don’t have enough fingering weight.”

2. On the same post, in response to the blogger mentioning a recent change in her appearance, multiple people assuming pregnancy and one person saying “congratulations, but please don’t flood us with baby knitting patterns now”. (I assumed radical hairstyle change, which turns out to be the actual case. Fortunately the blogger is childfree by choice.)

(ETA: and now someone has commented on the post with the new hair asking if she donated her long hair to Locks of Love. Why would a U.K.-based blogger be donating her hair to a US charity, ffs?)

3. On a post using a word that means different things in different versions of English, a number of people from the country of the poster’s birth (but not the one they currently reside in) popping up in comments to make snippy remarks about how Word means X in their country, but if the poster meant Y...

Some days I think the human race deserves its inevitable doom, though I wish I didn’t have to be part of it.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I'm glad no one made that assumption when I changed my hair colour a while back!

That'd have been a first for medical science! :o)

[white_hart]

;-) I just don't get why people would assume, when someone talks about a change in appearance, that that must mean pregancy and not any other kind of change. And even if she had been pregnant I think it's terribly rude to say anything based on that adjustment until the person explicitly says so.

[perennialanna]

There are charities that take cut hair to make wigs in this country too (the Duchess of Cambridge donated her hair when she had quite a haircut), but the person in question didn't have particularly long hair anyway! Also, I don't think they take dyed hair.

The pregnancy thing is just WTF: people being coy about pregnancy (and what in any of her writing over the years suggests she would be coy about it anyway?) tend to be a lot more twee (and more obvious).

[white_hart]

I was never sure how long her hair was - I’m not sure I ever saw a picture of her with it down. But if dyed hair is out and she has just mentioned giving up dyeing it then it’s an even more ridiculous question.

I find it weird both that that’s what people assumed, and how much the assumers are doubling down on their right to make assumptions about people and act on them without thinking about how that will affect the people they’re assuming about.

[caulkhead]

I'm glad I didn't read the comments. I just thought I like the look of a) the haircut and b) the cardigan.

[white_hart]

I don’t normally read the comments, but I happened to spot the people leaping to pregnancy congratulations on the previous post and then couldn’t stop myself looking at them on the follow-up.

[perennialanna]

I based my guess on pictures of her with her plaits loose rather than wrapped round her head, because I wore my hair plaited and pinned to my head for years and I plait L's twice a day so I have a fairly good idea of how much plaiting shortens it.

People! I got quite a lot of vocal misgendering on my way back from the monastery. Saturday night drunks and Reception children lack social filters. And internet commenters, it would seem.

[white_hart]

I don't remember mine ever being long enough to plait and wrap round my head, and at its longest it came about halfway between my shoulder and my elbow, so I assumed longer than that, maybe elbow-length? Which seems pretty long to me but mine has been short for 14 years and was bobbed for years before that so my perception is probably skewed.

[perennialanna]

She plaited the ends into each other at the top of her head, which only takes just past shoulder length.

[white_hart]

Goodness, I didn't even realise that was possible!

[perennialanna]

Needs clips and co-operative hair. I suspect yours would be too think (mine is very thin when tamed by plaiting).

[white_hart]

Co-operative is certainly not a word I have ever used to describe my hair (which is basically why I keep it short - the less there is of it the less of a pain it has a chance to be).

[ankaret]

Oh, how clever. I wonder if there is an instructional video on YouTube?

[white_hart]

There must be. (I have just googled dates and realised that I have had my hair short for about three months longer than YouTube has existed for. Then again, it hasn't really been long enough to plait this century. And now I feel much older than any amount of grey could make me feel.)

[ironed_orchid]

Ugh re: 1 and 2.

I witnessed 3. and charitably thought one person might be saying it ironically, but then others kept chiming in and ugh.

[white_hart]

It just ended up coming across as terribly smug.

[ironed_orchid]

I think the reason it bugs me is that as non-USA English speakers we tend to consume US media and in doing so we learn their usages, but they never seem to bother to learn British or Australian or NZ or any other usage. (While at the same time fetishizing or mocking our accents.)

[white_hart]

Yes, that's exactly it - it comes across as very much taking the view that US English is the One True English and all the other kinds are mere shadows, rather than "there are lots of different versions of English and isn't that interesting?".

Long comment, sorry

[ankaret]

A resounding OH FOR GOODNESS' SAKE to all of this. You would not believe how long I spent crafting a comment to 3 that conveyed 'X has enough in the way of ChosenCountry idiots making her uncomfortable with their stereotypes about Birth Country, please to not be clobbering X from the other side' without setting off a flamewar. Or maybe you would.

I have been read Lynne Murphy's book on US v. UK English and it occurs to me in that context that while UK English speakers annoy their transatlantic cousins by outright insulting their language choices (which is, obviously, very rude) US English speakers most often cause annoyance by obliviously assuming speakers of other Englishes are trying to speak US English but getting it wrong. I think something similar was going on here except X is familiar with both and does not need correcting so WTF.

(Also I wish people realised that if someone else, or three someone elses, have already made the same feeble joke it is not incumbent on you to make it again, unless you are cosplaying as a Twitter bot for some reason)

As far as 2 goes, I hang out intermittently on a forum for people with long hair, and the Locks of Love proselytisers show up there regularly and are an enormous nuisance. (Actually slightly *more* of a nuisance than creepy hair fetishists, because the mods have a zero tolerance policy on hair fetishists. No insult meant to fetish people who are not creeps) A frequent suggested response is 'Why don't you donate part of your liver? It'll grow back'. In any case perenialanna is right that they don't take dyed hair.

Re: Long comment, sorry

[white_hart]

I would believe it. I gave up and subposted instead.

Yes, it's the apparent obliviousness to the possibility that words might be used differently in other Englishes that annoys me, especially when it almost always comes across as fake - I have seen conversations where one person was not aware of the meaning the other person intended, and they tend to go along the lines of "I'm a bit confused - where I'm from, X means Thing, but it sounds like you're using it to mean OtherThing, is that right? If so, my answer is Y" rather than just answering as if X was being used to mean Thing when that clearly makes no sense. It always comes across as very One True Way and utterly dismissive of non-US Englishes.

Re: Long comment, sorry

[ankaret]

One of these days they will encounter an irate speaker of Caribbean English and get their assumptions handed back to them.

Re: Long comment, sorry

[ironed_orchid]

Thank you for your comment. It seems to have worked.

I succumbed and gave a deliberately stupid answer to a seemingly stupid question.