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

[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?".