A question of forum etiquette
Is the "post withdrawn for calling Eadon a cunt" thing universal or just me?
PS. He is one.
This topic was created by dogged .
I think it's which words one uses. The "C" word can't be biologically correct anyway, as there can't be any question that Eadon is male (just read his posts).
I've seen plenty of posts suggesting that Eadon is a touch misguided, maybe to the degree of being certifiable, which is why I've never had to bother myself, so maybe it's just the use of an biological abusive word?
It's a word with a specific biological meaning related to a part of the anatomy a woman has & a man doesn't. I was therefore making what I thought was a miuldly amusing comment about how inappropriate that word was when referring to a man, but "whoosh" clearly over some people's heads.
Unless of course the correct meaning of the word wasn't known when it was used.....
Ah I misjudged you then. There seems to be a tendency in recent years for people to use words they know are considered abusive without knowing the actual meaning of the word - when you tell them the meaning of what they just called someone they are either horrified or just plain disbelieving.
Doesn't make any difference though to my initial comment; you may have intended to imply Eadon is wrongness, but to some readers the term used is in itself offensive.
Was I personally offended? Nope, I don't take offence easily at language - I was brought up with horses, motorbikes & rock music and can outswear most of my male friends for that reason!
There seems to be a tendency in recent years for people to use words they know are considered abusive without knowing the actual meaning of the word
Corinne,
My Mum had picked up twat as a nice safe, inoffensive insult. The worst swear word she'll allow herself is oh bugger. When we were kids it was "oh bugs", in the hope we wouldn't notice... She's in her mid 70s so swearing isn't something she does much, and it mostly makes her uncomfortable.
It was extremely funny when she found out what twat actually meant. I've never heard her use it since. Perhaps I ought to persuade her that calling people tea-baggers is a nice harmless insult...
Apart from being an ad hominem attack, I don't think Eadon is a cunt.
Muppet? Yes. Bellend? Yes. Cunt? Not so much.
To be considered a cunt one would have to be a deeply unpleasant person with few, or ideally no, redeeming features. I've not seen anything from Eadon to indicate that he has any personal faults apart from being a misguided troll with an evangelical hatred of everything Microsoft-related for some reason. I suspect that his mother may have put a mobile that played the Win 95 startup jingle on his pram handle, scarring him for life.
But then what do I know? I resorted to calling him a twat once and got away with it.
I am not personally offended by the word and I have no quarrel with a general discussion on the reader forums. But attaching this discussion to a fellow commentard, whatever you think about him, oversteps the mark.
BTW - we would not accept this word in comments attached to articles - or use this word - as a swear word - in an article.
dogged,
It's one of the few swearwords that still retains some of its power to shock. You still don't hear it very often. And most people would put it top of the naughty hit parade.
I guess in 10-15 years time it'll be as commonplace as fuck has become. I can't think of anything else left to use, and as many of these swearwords are quite old that could mean nothing new comes along to replace it. Rather like antibiotics slowly become less useful as immunity builds up - soon there will be no effective swears left...
Well apart from Belgium...
I don't know why Eadon gets to you so much though. Which he obviously does from the levels of exasperation in some of your responses. He's not offensive to other users, apart from sometimes calling them shills. And even then, he usually does that in general terms. A pointed passive-aggressive, "there's a lot of Microsoft Shills about" in reply to one of my nice posts about Win Mob is the worst I can think of off-hand. He's also not got the full set of troll-skills. He'll bomb a thread with anti-MS posts, but only reply to the posts that go up while he's still looking at it. He doesn't tend to endlessly come back and obsessively reply to all the people having a go at him.
Plus I get uncomfortable at some of the personal abuse he cops. Mostly people make funny digs (and if you're trolling you have to take that), but sometimes people stray over into being personal and nasty. And I've never seen him respond to that by returning the abuse. So he deserves brownie points for that.
So I don't think it's fair for you to call him a cunt. If your post got modded, then it deserved it. When I was a forum mod I'd have handed out a day's forum ban for it as well. But that was a far more strictly modded community that here. On the Irish forum I was even supposed to stop them saying feck. Separating an Irishman from his right to say that is fecking impossible.
So don't be a stupid Ghent. Lighten up. As jake would say, have a home brew. Although all the home brew I've tasted was vile, so maybe have something brewed by professionals instead.
...soon there will be no effective swears left...
Nope, things come and go over time. Roll back a few hundred years and you find that every town of any size has a "Great Cunt Lane", a "Cunt Alley" or similar, which is where the brothels were to be found. The truly horrific "naughty word" of that period was "slids", a contraction of "God's eyelids".
These days, the truly beyond the pale epithets are the ones alluding to the ethnic origin of the target.
The reason is cultural change. In the Middle Ages, religion was the taboo subject to make light of. These days it's race. In another few hundred years..........what?
Looks like that's definately a myth. There's an old map on Wikipedia showing the location of the City's Grope Countelane and the surrounding brothel area. That's south of Cheapside, just east of Queen street and thus, while fairly close, significantly west and south of Threadneedle Street.
Nope, definately been given the boot.
First time I've seen that happen around here, although there are a few "disappeared" from days gone by that I now reckon may have been given a rather less public execution than that.