| Antonio, on HN, you wrote -- "I hate how being harsh has become fashionable. Whatever happened to manners?" on your blog, you follow up by saying -- "I stand behind those words. Acting bitter on the Internet seems to be increasingly gathering the popularity amongst an audience that’s used to being amused and entertained by cheap attacks." Two points: the first is that you use the word "bitter" to back up an anecdote of someone using "fucking" as an adjective to describe a poor User Interface experience. I disagree with that assessment, as there's nothing that suggests bitterness by using "fucking." It's merely a more extreme descriptor of the user's anger or exasperation, but it doesn't suggest bitterness, which has a distinctly different flavour (if you will excuse the pun). Secondly, I don't believe anything "happened" to manners. There have always been people, often a vast majority of a given population, who used much coarser language to describe their everyday life and experience. Often this was a class distinction, thus the reference to "swearing like a sailor" etc. I expect that many people posting here were exposed -- in the context of software engineering or computer science -- to colleagues who were either used to communicating in an academic or professional context. Although coarse language is to be expected to some extent, written communication about features, bugs, etc. in a corporate US context tends to avoid direct expletives for various reasons ("lack of professionalism" etc). This isn't the case in parts of the OSS community or parts of Europe. You may have seen this before -- http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ -- the number of fuck/shit/crap uses in the Linux source code. Do you similarly think that the Linux contributors who provided the patches (or indeed Linus himself) need to "grow up?" Different contexts, different modes of communication. But the truth why that dude used "fuck" all over the place? It's a very quick and easy expression of dismay or outrage, and it gets cheap laughs. Whether or not that's an adolescent desire I can't say. Yet some of the most serious commentators on, say, international politics heavily use 'fuck' throughout their own communication. Read some interviews with Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh, for instance -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Hersh |