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Parable - 177 - HD
🕑 Added 2020-10-31 05:28:53 +0000 UTC100% Fine.
Commentary
Oh hey, alignment-based consequences! NEAT!
Of course, Susan was only neutral, not "good", so it shouldn't go THAT badly, right?
What.
Sometimes, when I don't use a question mark at the end of a sentence that looks like a question, I confuse some readers.
Which is understandable! What I'm usually going for with that is a delivery that makes it clear that they already know the answer, which usually can be summed up as "they don't raise their voice or anything in the way English speakers tend to when asking a question".
I don't know how common or uncommon that is when other languages get involved. It seems to be pretty universal, but I'm fascinated by language differences and the quirks that can result from them.
Comments
Some Ed
I don't think that's what's going on. I'm borderline autistic, and my lack of communication skills has been a big concern for me for most of my life. I grew up with nightmares that I'd meet a woman so amazing that her mere presence would feel better than anything I could imagine, despite the fact that I had all of these dreams about it. But I wouldn't be able to communicate, and after a short time, I'd never see her again. So I talked with far more people than I was comfortable with, and read far more than I wanted about how to communicate, and so I can relate that this punctuation usage existed back in the 1980s, and as far as I could tell, dates back to time immemorial. What is *new* is that we now have an engaging way to educate people on communication strategies and methods that is not tied to people who have organization determined to protect the mediocre from the skilled. Teachers who claim that kids "can't learn that fast" are now being proven wrong in ways they'll never admit to.
Brooks Moses
Amusingly, I was just watching a video about this earlier today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS4X1JfX6_Q. It's a Tom Scott video, so it's both very-well-done and pleasantly short. :)
David Fenger
Rhoda's worried-face in the third panel feels particularly well done. Very expressive.
Mitchell Sealy
Yeah, I've heard some people point to the question mark thing as a way that the online generation is getting more expressive with text. Apparently we use punctuation to indicate tone to a much greater extent than previous generations. A mild example of this is using periods on sentences that are grammatically questions, but which we don't intend to be read with the cadence of a question.
