Posted by Minnie-Haha on August 1, 2005, at 20:58:57
The last time I was blocked, there was a footnote of sorts from Dr. Bob about something I’d written aside from the “blockable” statement.
I’d written, “... the 3-complaint [rule], as proposed by Dr. Bob ... would silence me in my ‘mission’ to simply make this kind of habitual, public behavior, whoever does it, unacceptable.”
Dr. Bob’s comment was, “That's the thing, people can feel they're the target of someone else's mission.”
This reminds me of a past thread where I brought up the subject of punctuation.
For instance, in what I’d written in my above-mentioned post, I used quotation marks in a way that The Chicago Manual of Style calls “scare quotes.” From the manual: “Quotation marks are often used to alert the readers that a term is used in a nonstandard, ironic, or other special sense... they imply ‘This is not my term’ or ‘This is not how the term is usually applied.’”
To put it as clearly as I can, when I used the word “mission” in my blocked post, I meant that I believed that some thought me to be on a mission, and not that I saw my effort as a mission or myself as a zealot.
This is another reason why I believe it is a good practice to not jump to any conclusions, and to ask the writer of any post what they mean if there is any doubt in one’s mind. Some folks are better at grammar than others and it is easy to misinterpret what others write.
Consider the first paragraph of this post. I put quotation marks around the word “blockable” because I’m not even sure it is a real word; I used punctuation to denote slang or “argot” (the specialized vocabulary of a particular group). And just now I put quotation marks around “argot” because it’s a word that might not be familiar to all. And in this paragraph, I’ve put quotation marks around “blockable” and “argot” because I was not referring to those words functionally, but as words themselves.
I am by no means perfect in my use of grammar; especially online where one often writes in a hurry. What I mean is, as both writers and readers here, we need to consider not only words, but also punctuation when pondering the meaning of the written word.
poster:Minnie-Haha
thread:536555
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20050728/msgs/536555.html