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

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.