(they thought about using the Facebook commenting system - which I find is the scourge of the devil, slows websites WAY down, but maybe that's just for me since I'm not on FB).
This drives me nuts. A couple of political blogs that I used to comment on switched over to this with the result that I no longer comment there. The way political blogs can get, I'm not linking comments that directly to the rest of my online life. And I'm not setting up a dummy Yahoo account which appears to be the only way around. (Also annoying: the comment display order defaults to "social ranking" and you have to click every time to resort chronologically. WTF?")
I'm not alone - the comment volumes have dropped precipitously.
One of my favorite foreign words is rather simple. It’s the German “doch”. It simply means yes, but to a negative question. For example, the question, “You aren’t going?” in English. If you answer “yes”, it is ambiguous (“yes, you aren’t going”, or “yes, you are going”). Doch removes that ambiguity. It always means (in this case), “Yes, you are going”.
French has this ("oui" vs. "si"), but I don't think Italian or Spanish does, do they?
We must endeavor to introduce this word into the common lexicon.
I think it might be Rio's coinage. She was the Queen of the Kerfauxfle. Though Msbelle's got a real knack for it too.
I think it might be Rio's coinage.
That should probably be a kerFUCKOfle, then.
I wrote them a longish email about how I thought pseudos isn't the problem, but that lack of community and ineffective moderation WAS the problem.
Indeed. The whole Google+ name debate has resulted in a lot of blogging about this issue. In fact, the other day a flist member linked to a comment by Kathy Sierra, where she said exactly what you said, and that she wished she's used a pseud from the beginning, not for herself, but for her family and friends who ended up taking a lot of damage as well.
The best semi-political blog comments section I know is Ta-Nehisi Coates' blog, and because it's moderated and there's a community built up, it doesn't matter what name I post under, so long as it's consistent. Whereas most other political blogs, the comments are unmoderated and it's a swamp of unpleasantness. And that's got nothing to do with real names.
The worst-behaved person I know on the internet, someone who appears to be having a slow psychological breakdown and who exhibits seriously threatening/stalkery behavior to a number of women he's fixated on, is a man posting and commenting under his legal name.
The cafe downstairs sells a cranberry flaxseed bagel. What is that, even? And no poppyseed.
There's a word for this in English: Kerfauxfle.
'Course, that's a marriage of a Scots word and a French one, so not really English, so much.
