D users in Munich, Rome, Venice, or Frankfurt?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"BCS" <none at anon.com> wrote in message 
news:a6268ff5b338cba14afe6aca70 at news.digitalmars.com...
> I have more problems with singular they making it hard to exclude the 
> plural than anything else. It's right up there with (but not as common as) 
> some neutral statements being promoted to negative ones: "I don't like 
> cheese" vs. "I dislike cheese", making it hard to state some things.
>

That's a *HUGE* pet peeve of mine. I get sooo frustrated when attempting 
make a neutral statement around people who just simply will not accept that 
neutral statements exist. Drives me absolutely crazy. "Suzie is not 
tall/happy/beautiful" does NOT mean "Suzie is short/unhappy/ugly" (or even 
mid-height/calm/average-looking for that matter), but most people absolutely 
insist in believing that everything is either one extreme or the other and 
just can't comprehend neutrality unless you very, very blatantly spell it 
out for them and prop everything up with boatloads of disclaimers.

A similar thing that also drives me absolutely crazy is when people take a 
*comparison* and automatically assume that absolute statements are being 
made about one or both of the things being compared. For instance, saying 
"Babylon 5 is worse than Stargate SG-1", does *NOT* imply "I dislike Babylon 
5" nor does it imply "I dislike Stargate SG-1". But I have frequently come 
across people that have made both those assumptions when presented with a 
sentence in that form. Similarly, saying "Murder is better than genocide" 
does *NOT* imply "I think murder is perfectly acceptable." But a lot of 
people seem to be completely incapable of comprehending these distinctions.

Another note: Just because I used "Murder is better than genocide" as an 
example, does *not* mean that I'm actually saying that I consider murder to 
be better than genocide. And that previous sentence that I just wrote does 
*NOT* imply that I consider genocide to be better than murder, or that I 
consider them equal in severity. In fact, nowhere in this entire message 
have I (or will I) made *any* indication of my opinions on murder, genocide, 
or how they compare, or that I even have or don't have opinions on the 
matter, and it pisses me off that I frequently find myself needing to make 
qualifications like these just to prevent people from putting words in my 
mouth.

Regarding that last sentence in the previous paragraph, note that a lot of 
people would take that as me saying "I need to make this particular 
qualification because I think the people on this NG would be unable to 
correctly understand it without the qualification." And as per the whole 
point of my entire above rant, I'm not saying anything of the sort, or the 
opposite, or etc...

I hope all of the above serves as a good example of why people need to be 
able to make neutral statements and comparisons without the listener 
automatically assuming a bunch of extra garbage. Because when that happens, 
speakers are forced to turn perfectly simple ideas into an absolute mess of 
disclaimers and qualifications such as above. (Not that I'm saying I was 
forced to make such disclaimers in this particular case...etc...etc...)