Old Man Gordon wrote:

Thanks, Sara, for enlightening my obviously jaded sense of morality.  Now that I know that euphemisms are lies, I will be sure to never use them.  Is sarcasm still ok? omg

 I think that sarcasm is always highly overrated and potentially the final straw in every war or conflict in our history.

If everybody on this forum simply decided to stop being sarcastic what would happen?

Stannum

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for your insightful post that has opened my eyes a little.

I must comment on your aside to me.

Old Man Gordon and I have settled our little misunderstanding but I can not accept that his initial two responses to my post were way too harsh and I doubt that he would now defend them in such terms.  He thought that I was something that I am not and his view of my question was canted accordingly.  I will answer a question posed by a dictator with a different mindset to that of a senator.

I actually hesitated to use inculcate because I thought it a bit harsh but it is the appropriate word and I could not think of a replacement and as far as arcane goes that is so neutral as to be beige yet these two very innocuous words spawened;

Self so enlightened

others ont worthy of enlightenment

completely weak minded fools

hence inferior

Condescenders are those who act in a superior way

element of pride

so, all in all, I would characterise the initial response as way harsh but that is my opinion.

The pleasing aspect is the humanity displayed by Old Man Gordon since he recognised his mistake.

Stannum

Stannum,

While arcane could be interpreted as beige, I'd say that I often (and by often, I mean less than once a month) hear it used as more of a cerise. Sure, something that is mysterious, obscure, or esoteric, isn't necessarily negative, but in my culture (Seattle, WA, USA), I think that the latter two synonyms are certainly perceived negatively, and thus, saying that something which someone considers personally important is arcane could be perceived as a slight. Wow, that was some sloppy sentence! In any case, I don't think that your word choice was poor, I just think that the words could be perceived as charged.

It sounds like this is all water under the bridge now, so it's probably not worth mentioning, but I strongly agree with your assertion that OMG's vocabularly choices in his initial response were wayyyyyyy more charged than yours. It seemed like he jumped from a few potentially incendiary words to a pool of them. He certainly found pride somewhere between the lines rather than in the actual post, and he introduced his own thoughts on the difference between atheists and agnostics. However, I guess I just didn't interpret it as a personal attack or a jab back at you; I just thought it was a wild yet plausible extrapolation on your hypothetical. Yes, it turns out that he was widely missing your point, but his response seemed to me at least a little bit valid. Perhaps I'm being too charitable about his post, but it seems like we're all rather guilty of responding too strongly in these forums.

-Andrew