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ArchivesRe: my name is not on the list
in reply to a message by jamaica moon
There's no need to be snarky, there's no way the website can contain every single name on earth. A lot of common-ish names aren't on the database yet. You can submit it yourself, so it will come up as an user-submitted name and then there's a chance the site owner will include it in the list.
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Great to tell this person about how to submit a name, but why would you accuse him/her of being "snarky"? I see nothing snide or sarcastic about the original post myself.
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I'm sorry, but "tone" is something which is read into written communications by the reader. You can't be sure of the "tone" unless the writer tells you directly.
There is research showing that people are very poor judges of whether or not an email or discussion board post is meant to be sarcastic by the sender, even when they know the person sending the email in the "real world" outside of cyberspace. If people can't do this accurately when they know the person, they are not likely to be accurate at all when judging a communication from someone they don't know.
This person is from Jamaica. Are you familiar with Jamaican culture? Do you know how people of any age normally address strangers in that culture? If you have no experience with that, you have no way to judge whether or not addressing someone as "Madam" is meant to be sarcastic or not.
It is not good practice to accuse someone of this on a discussion board unless one has had a lot of experience with the particular person making "trolling" type posts. In my personal experience, more "flame wars" are started by people misinterpreting someone else's "tone" than by deliberate acts of "trolling".
There is research showing that people are very poor judges of whether or not an email or discussion board post is meant to be sarcastic by the sender, even when they know the person sending the email in the "real world" outside of cyberspace. If people can't do this accurately when they know the person, they are not likely to be accurate at all when judging a communication from someone they don't know.
This person is from Jamaica. Are you familiar with Jamaican culture? Do you know how people of any age normally address strangers in that culture? If you have no experience with that, you have no way to judge whether or not addressing someone as "Madam" is meant to be sarcastic or not.
It is not good practice to accuse someone of this on a discussion board unless one has had a lot of experience with the particular person making "trolling" type posts. In my personal experience, more "flame wars" are started by people misinterpreting someone else's "tone" than by deliberate acts of "trolling".
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"Hey sir or madam I don't understand why my name's not on the list" sounds quite snarky to me, especially the "sir or madam" part.
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I think it sounded snarky too. It's the tone of the statement, which already is established when they said "hey." The informality and run-on sentence doesn't help, either.
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