benevolent assholism

like telling someone not to use a word, or getting involved in someone else's argument. what's it got to do with you? nothing. but you risk being an interfering asshole to stop someone from saying something stupid, or projecting an "asshole" batsign into their next conversation. I keep wanting to jump in when ILX is using mong, but what does it have to do with me? am I crossing lines? I am pro-interfering, I think, I think it can be a generous act. but that's separate from whether you're being a dick.

Who uses mong?

whats mong w/it

didn't benevolent assholism used to be president of nigeria?

proponent of plain old assholism here

i feel like maybe i don't 'get' mong, on ilx, like it has some specific pre-established meaning. it is just in a bunch of threads. this wasn't meant to be a referendum on the word mong, so much - like i feel like people can legitimately rep for whichever word they want to use, & i found myself replacing 'dumb' in my OP, which i usually use unthinkingly, so it's obviously a sliding scale &c&c&c - but i guess it works as an example of something where i'm not in a conversation but want to interfere with.
xxxp

we dont have this word in america

But you do have Ricky Gervais, which is worse

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mong
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mong

i am not trying to shut you down w/the etymology: i'm just saying. it is the kind of thing that rings out to me, maybe because of cultural differences or dual meanings or whatever. & semantics are weird, because some amount of concerned fussiness is always going to be pitched against the colloquial reappropriation of words - so the insensitivity of using schizophrenic to describe something contradictory, say. so while being open to understanding that maybe mong specifically means something in the states that it doesn't here, & so my squeamishness is not really merited, it just seemed like a good example of a time i want to maybe overreach to stop something perceived as negative from happening.

if anyone has a good story about a time they dissuaded someone from buying an SUV on environmental grounds, please jump in, i don't think my aggro semantics argument is totally doing its job

It's mostly used here as a contraction of mongrel on the aus/nz threads, I don't tend to notice it much outside that, but it does pop up once in a while xp

ty for that. i guess i am referring to situations in which it is not that, or in which i am hypothetically still oversensitively still concerned by the duality.

It's mostly used here as a contraction of mongrel on the aus/nz threads

So it's not offensive... unusual for Aussies/Kiwis that

Joe it's short for Mongoloid as in the dated term for Down Syndrome and is used in England basically how ppl here might use tard.

thx google

on the aus/nz threads mongs is short for mongrels which is short for flamin' mongrels which is an expression used by a character called alf roberts in a soap called home and away and which di from dunedin started calling australian ilxors years ago. its use on those threads has zero to do with down's syndrome. i didn't realise for a long time that there was such a useage, it's not common in nz or australia.

alf roberts is coronation street ffs, home and away's alf is alf stewart. GOD.

lol oops

i did used to wonder how offensive alf calling people flamin' mongrels was, it seems pretty harsh.

i only watch coronation street when i'm in nz and i only watch home and away during the australian open so i'm a bit useless. i do like alf stewart though.

he only says it to people who deserve it.

eg, those who tamper with the surf club or loiter there

I think what you're talking about is "pedantry" - I have the dual afflictions of pedantry & not really knowing what I'm talking about a lot of the time, so grain of salt, but I think people who find pedantry more annoying than people who're misusing perfectly good words are the worst. Proverbs 12:1, dummies

Yeah I was going to say, my more common manifestation of this is correcting people's grammar in conversation.

Or trying to convince my parents not to use words that make them sound like unrepentant racists, that's a fun one.

Yeah I was going to say, my more common manifestation of this is correcting people's grammar in conversation.

i'm very appreciative of people who do this, i've been pavlov'd out of several bad grammatical habits.

i thought he said galah not mongrel

that's cuz you're a drongo.

we could do with alf in my city, we have many vulnerable surf clubs who live in terror of disgraceful hordes of loitering tampering flamin' mongrels.

I think what you're talking about is "pedantry" - I have the dual afflictions of pedantry & not really knowing what I'm talking about a lot of the time, so grain of salt, but I think people who find pedantry more annoying than people who're misusing perfectly good words are the worst. Proverbs 12:1, dummies

― decrepit but free (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, 7 June 2012 14:42 (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk: on reflection I think i was probably shooting more for Paternalism, C/D, because I'm shooting more for times that I think there's something well-intentioned rather than glorifying about an attempt to 'correct'. i would love to swoop in & say "you mean testament not tantamount" or "that isn't what reactionary means [but it's fine because everyone uses it like that now]" whenever the opportunity arises, & there's a little grain of usefulness there, albeit probably just as a byproduct of my desire to get to correct someone. but i think it's different if it's perhaps a self-immolating desire just to stop someone from fucking up, as in the situations where you're jumping into someone else's conversation & so are clearly socially erring. so one recent example is w/"frape", which people were using on facebook to refer to people jacking their statuses while they were looking away. & i get people using frape, because i guess it was a neat conflation of two words that in a self-explanatory way gave a name to a thing that there probably wasn't even another name for. but it's also, obviously, really stupid, & so it's the kinda thing where you might wanna paternalistically say HEY YOU YOU SHOULDN'T SAY THAT, either because you want to be a warrior for lexical righteousness or because someone you like said it automatically & you want to save them from saying it again in front of people who are just gonna R their DE & write off the person saying frape, which tbh I am at a stage of wrt other words. probably if you want to level pedantry at me now though that would be okay because this is seeming like a minor distinction but it still feels like a something.

ty for the various clarifications WRT mong, btw, also re: home and away which i actually remember the character detailing & relevant catchphrasing of

Question: is this about the language "correction" (x --> y) or the behavior of correction itself?

more the correction itself: the slightly controlling and anti-social impulse of small-scale-imperialistically correcting someone, provided you have some kind of purpose for doing so. so not what mong means, but that i wade into a thread & call someone out, & whether there's a value to it or if it's eaten up by the self-righteousness/offence involved. iirc there was something in a gender thread flagged up by hoos about the need for guys to call each other out in guy-only environments, & it's sorta in that sphere particularly, i think, when you're going against a breezy social context.

shoulda started, "more the behavior of correction itself"

Well I'm going out west where I belong, where the days are short and the nights are mong.