You know that old post on r/ShowerThoughts which went something like “People who speak somewhat broken english as their second language sound stupid, but they’re actually smarter than average because they know at least one other language”?
I was thinking about this. I don’t struggle with my grasp of English thelanguage so much, but I certainly do with what might be called an American/Western cadence. I’m sure it’s noticeable occasionally, inducing just the slightest bit of microcringe in the typical person that hangs around here. Things like strange sentence structure, or weird use of italics, or overuse of a word, or over/under hedging… all the writing skills you already mastered in grade school. And you probably grew up seeing that the ones who continued to struggle with it often didn’t get other things quickly either.
Maybe you notice some of these already in what you’re reading right now (despite my painstaking efforts otherwise). It’s likely to look “wannabe” or “amateurish” because it is−one learns language and rhythm by imitating. But this imitation game is confined to language & rhythm, and it would be a mistake to also infer from this that the ideas behind them would be unoriginal or amateurish.
I’d like to think it wouldn’t bother anyone on LW because people here believe that linguistic faux pas, as much as social ones, ought to be screened off by the content.
But it probably still happens. You might believe it but not alieve it. Imagine someone saying profound things but using “u” and “ur” everywhere, even for “you’re”. You could actually try this (even though it would be a somewhat shallow experiment, because what I’m pointing at with “cadence” is deeper than spelling mistakes) to get a flavor for it.
A solution I can think of: make a [Non-Native Speaker]tag and allow people to self-tag. Readers could see it and shoot for a little bit more charity across anything linguistically-aesthetically displeasing. The other option is to take advantage of customizable display names here, but I wonder if that’d be distracting if mass-adopted, like twitter handles that say “[Name] …is in New York”.
I would (maybe, at some point) even generalize it to [English Writing Beginner] or some such, which you can self-assign even if you speak natively but are working on your writing skills. This one is more likely to be diluted though.
Could this be accomplished using custom commenting guidelines? Perhaps just adding a sentence about whether one wants to opt into or out of linguistic-aesthetic feedback would suffice if one has strong feelings on the matter.
This would work for top level posts, but for comment replies, the commenting guidelines feature would need to be expanded to show the guidelines of the person being replied to as well as the author of the main post. For instance, when writing this reply I see only Raemon’s commenting guidelines.
(A suggestion for the forum)
You know that old post on r/ShowerThoughts which went something like “People who speak somewhat broken english as their second language sound stupid, but they’re actually smarter than average because they know at least one other language”?
I was thinking about this. I don’t struggle with my grasp of English the language so much, but I certainly do with what might be called an American/Western cadence. I’m sure it’s noticeable occasionally, inducing just the slightest bit of microcringe in the typical person that hangs around here. Things like strange sentence structure, or weird use of italics, or overuse of a word, or over/under hedging… all the writing skills you already mastered in grade school. And you probably grew up seeing that the ones who continued to struggle with it often didn’t get other things quickly either.
Maybe you notice some of these already in what you’re reading right now (despite my painstaking efforts otherwise). It’s likely to look “wannabe” or “amateurish” because it is−one learns language and rhythm by imitating. But this imitation game is confined to language & rhythm, and it would be a mistake to also infer from this that the ideas behind them would be unoriginal or amateurish.
I’d like to think it wouldn’t bother anyone on LW because people here believe that linguistic faux pas, as much as social ones, ought to be screened off by the content.
But it probably still happens. You might believe it but not alieve it. Imagine someone saying profound things but using “u” and “ur” everywhere, even for “you’re”. You could actually try this (even though it would be a somewhat shallow experiment, because what I’m pointing at with “cadence” is deeper than spelling mistakes) to get a flavor for it.
A solution I can think of: make a [Non-Native Speaker] tag and allow people to self-tag. Readers could see it and shoot for a little bit more charity across anything linguistically-aesthetically displeasing. The other option is to take advantage of customizable display names here, but I wonder if that’d be distracting if mass-adopted, like twitter handles that say “[Name] …is in New York”.
I would (maybe, at some point) even generalize it to [English Writing Beginner] or some such, which you can self-assign even if you speak natively but are working on your writing skills. This one is more likely to be diluted though.
Could this be accomplished using custom commenting guidelines? Perhaps just adding a sentence about whether one wants to opt into or out of linguistic-aesthetic feedback would suffice if one has strong feelings on the matter.
This would work for top level posts, but for comment replies, the commenting guidelines feature would need to be expanded to show the guidelines of the person being replied to as well as the author of the main post. For instance, when writing this reply I see only Raemon’s commenting guidelines.