Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Sebastian Pipping <sping@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tone in Gentoo
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 2010 22:33:53
Message-Id: 4C195135.1050702@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tone in Gentoo by Roy Bamford
1 Roy,
2
3
4 On 06/16/10 21:40, Roy Bamford wrote:
5 > As a native English speaker (from England) I view Jers reply as terse
6 > and to the point, completely lacking in tone.
7
8 interesting. Looking at the sentence
9
10 "When did you point this out to devrel?"
11
12 I would like to say that while it's not impolite per se it's implicitly
13 saying "You _have to_ point this out to dev rel" in my ears. A more or
14 less word-by-word translation to German ("Wann hast du das gegenüber
15 DevRel angesprochen?") would make perfect sense and carry the same
16 problem so I assume it's not an English language thing. In contrast asking
17
18 "Have you pointed this out to DevRel? What was their reaction?"
19
20 does not seem to have this mis-hearing problem, at least not to me.
21
22
23 I remember a guy of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) saying something like
24
25 "Communication is always oriented at the receiver".
26
27 Applying that to tone and avoiding mis-interpretation the sender has the
28 power (and arguably the responsiblity) to sounds as friendly as needed
29 to be sure it will not be understood as unfriendly. In a way there's
30 always a way to be friendlier - _without_ faking anything.
31
32
33 Some of you may know ArneBab's signature saying:
34
35 "Being unpolitical means being political without realizing it."
36
37 Maybe not applying tone means applying tone without realizing, too.
38
39 Best,
40
41
42
43 Sebastian

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-dev] Re: Tone in Gentoo Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net>
Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Tone in Gentoo Roy Bamford <neddyseagoon@g.o>