Do you ordinarily find that you have difficulty maintaining different registers(1) for different contexts?
If so, I sympathize and wish you luck in overcoming that difficulty. It is an enormously useful skill: as you say, being perceived as nice is valuable, and different communities perceive different kinds of behavior as nice, so you do best to learn to signal appropriately for different contexts (2).
If you don’t have difficulty with this, though, then your comment puzzles me. If you agree with FKARoko that LW norms support “un-PC” (3) posts, or in any event ought to, then what cost are you concerned about… what’s the cost? Conversely, if you don’t agree with him, why refrain from criticizing un-PC statements… what confusion?
(2) Unless, of course, you spend all your time in only one community.
(3) Caveat: I don’t really understand what “PC” means; I’m using the term because it’s the term you and FKARoko both use. I gather you use it here as synonymous with “nice,” although in my own experience niceness often has more to do with how a statement is framed than what is actually being said.
For clarity’s sake: PC means politically correct and usually refers to political inoffensiveness. The term isn’t really apt for the current discussion because there was no talk of politics.
I don’t know if I’m great at code-switching. I can tell that LW is “not PC” or blunt-spoken. But the thing is, when some heuristic is good for you in most of your life, you may internalize it and simply make it a constant feature of your personality. For example, if it’s usually a bad idea for you to use swear words, you may be better off just not swearing at all, even when you’re in the saloon and swearing would be socially appropriate. You may want to personally identify as a non-curser. It makes double-sure that you’ll never swear at the wrong time.
If you don’t trust yourself to be socially agile in switching from situation to situation, then I think “better safe than sorry” makes sense.
If you don’t trust yourself to be socially agile in switching from situation to situation, then I think “better safe than sorry” makes sense.
Agreed as far as it goes. But that’s a big “if.”
The social agility you’re talking about is an important life skill. If I spend some time in contexts where a particular behavior has social benefits and some time in contexts where the same behavior has social costs, then I get the best results by staying aware of the context that I’m in and behaving appropriately.
That said, I do appreciate that it’s harder for some people than others. If I can’t do that, the next-best thing is to construct a superposition of rulesets and always apply it. This is similar to what you’re suggesting here… if the costs of cursing in the no-curse environments are much higher than the benefits of cursing in the yes-curse environments, adopting a “don’t curse regardless of context” rule as you suggest can work OK.
My point is, it’s a second-best option. Paying attention to my environment as it changes and responding accordingly has better payoffs, if I can manage it.
Do you ordinarily find that you have difficulty maintaining different registers(1) for different contexts?
If so, I sympathize and wish you luck in overcoming that difficulty. It is an enormously useful skill: as you say, being perceived as nice is valuable, and different communities perceive different kinds of behavior as nice, so you do best to learn to signal appropriately for different contexts (2).
If you don’t have difficulty with this, though, then your comment puzzles me. If you agree with FKARoko that LW norms support “un-PC” (3) posts, or in any event ought to, then what cost are you concerned about… what’s the cost? Conversely, if you don’t agree with him, why refrain from criticizing un-PC statements… what confusion?
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(1) I mean “register” in the linguistics sense.
(2) Unless, of course, you spend all your time in only one community.
(3) Caveat: I don’t really understand what “PC” means; I’m using the term because it’s the term you and FKARoko both use. I gather you use it here as synonymous with “nice,” although in my own experience niceness often has more to do with how a statement is framed than what is actually being said.
For clarity’s sake: PC means politically correct and usually refers to political inoffensiveness. The term isn’t really apt for the current discussion because there was no talk of politics.
I don’t know if I’m great at code-switching. I can tell that LW is “not PC” or blunt-spoken. But the thing is, when some heuristic is good for you in most of your life, you may internalize it and simply make it a constant feature of your personality. For example, if it’s usually a bad idea for you to use swear words, you may be better off just not swearing at all, even when you’re in the saloon and swearing would be socially appropriate. You may want to personally identify as a non-curser. It makes double-sure that you’ll never swear at the wrong time.
If you don’t trust yourself to be socially agile in switching from situation to situation, then I think “better safe than sorry” makes sense.
Agreed as far as it goes. But that’s a big “if.”
The social agility you’re talking about is an important life skill. If I spend some time in contexts where a particular behavior has social benefits and some time in contexts where the same behavior has social costs, then I get the best results by staying aware of the context that I’m in and behaving appropriately.
That said, I do appreciate that it’s harder for some people than others. If I can’t do that, the next-best thing is to construct a superposition of rulesets and always apply it. This is similar to what you’re suggesting here… if the costs of cursing in the no-curse environments are much higher than the benefits of cursing in the yes-curse environments, adopting a “don’t curse regardless of context” rule as you suggest can work OK.
My point is, it’s a second-best option. Paying attention to my environment as it changes and responding accordingly has better payoffs, if I can manage it.