Pet peeves

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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Thu Dec 28, 2017 12:45 am

As a result of a recent trip to Texas Hill Country, I've been reminded of three more pet peeves. Two of them are related to captive portals, and I may make a rant about those, because fuck captive portals and I hope the guy who was invented them is killed by army ants.

1. Airports that show you ads to get on their WiFi. (This is not connected to my trip, just reminded of my hatred of captive portals.) I'm already paying for your WiFi by buying a ticket through your airport. If airports were like hotels and I had a choice, I would do like I do with hotels and avoid the ones without free WiFi. Sadly, for most places this is simply not an option. Even in cities with multiple airports, Southwest usually only flies to one of them. Unfortunately, airports are a natural monopoly, and the amazing thing is that there are still some airports that don't do this.

2. Places that aren't showing you ads using captive portals. Ads are the only reason you'd want to use a captive portal where you couldn't use a more secure, more reliable solution.

3. Single-person, sex-segregated restrooms. This seems to be the most common bathroom configuration in Hill Country, though I've also seen it elsewhere. I get why people (particularly women) are uncomfortable with unisex multi-stall bathrooms, but if you have two single-stall bathrooms, what possible reason could you have for having a men's room and ladies' room?
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby DoglovingJim » Thu Dec 28, 2017 2:07 am

cmsellers wrote:but if you have two single-stall bathrooms, what possible reason could you have for having a men's room and ladies' room?


My church has one of those and uh... Lets just say that I breached that rule several times when the "male one" is occupied.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby JamishT » Sun Jan 14, 2018 9:38 am

I was just reminded of another pet peeve of mine: Country songs that sing the praise of California. California is not where the (stereo)typical country fan wants to live, they proudly live in the fly-over states (and there's a good song about that). California is where snobs, dirty commies, equally unclean hippies, and otherwise awful people live (the ranchers are fine though), according to country/redneck/hillbilly/etc lore. To be fair, the wedding I attended in California was outside of a small town in the Redwoods that felt super country-ish, BUT STILL. Also, singing the praises of California girls in a Country song is somehow just fine by me; I suppose there is the stereotype that they're generally way hotter than any other state's girls.

This post could also fit in the "Random Thoughts" thread, I know.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jan 14, 2018 4:57 pm

Given that you mostly listen to pop-music-with-steel-guitars that somehow gets called "country" these days, I'm probably going to regret asking this, but ... what songs are you talking about?

The only country song I know that has anything remotely positive to say about California is "Orange Blossom Special," and there it's pretty much "California has beaches."

That said: Merle Haggard was from Bakersfield. And if Merle ain't country I don't know who is.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jan 21, 2018 6:54 am

So two more emerged from a conversation on Discord. Again, they're literal pet peeves, of which I'm accumulating quite a list.

But first some context. As a kid, I had two really bad and surprisingly similar experiences with dogs. In the first one, I was repeatedly knocked over and slobbered on by a dog my godmother's partner had when we went to her house. In the second, I was knocked against the wall and slobbered on by a dog our neighbors had gotten when I was slightly older and larger. In both cases, I was told that the dog was "just being friendly" and "a puppy," for which I needed to make allowances.

Nowadays, I get annoyed when people call dogs which have attained their full size "puppies." Tess insists that while being annoyed at people excusing bad behavior by appealing to their dogs youth is a legitimate complaint, it is unreasonable of me to take offense at the terminology. But because of the associations, it still very much annoys me.

The other thing that really annoys me is when a dog does something I don't like (usually slobbering on me or investigating my crotch more thoroughly than the TSA), and the dog owners, who have failed to control it and see my horrified reaction, instead of apologizing tell me that their dog is "just being friendly" as if that makes it alright.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby jbobsully11 » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:06 pm

cmsellers wrote:Nowadays, I get annoyed when people call dogs which have attained their full size "puppies." Tess insists that while being annoyed at people excusing bad behavior by appealing to their dogs youth is a legitimate complaint, it is unreasonable of me to take offense at the terminology. But because of the associations, it still very much annoys me.

I kind of agree with you on that one, although I find it less annoying. To me, it sounds only slightly less weird than calling an adult human a “baby.”
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:23 pm

jbobsully11 wrote:I kind of agree with you on that one, although I find it less annoying. To me, it sounds only slightly less weird than calling an adult human a “baby.”

I think Tess's point is that full-sized dogs aren't fully-developed, but I do think you raise an interesting point. To me, "puppy" only refers to very young dogs, the equivalent of babies. But with most mammals, including dogs, there's no way to make the "baby/child" distinction you do with humans.

If you were to call a twenty-one-year-old, who is fully grown but doesn't have a fully-developed brain, "just a child," I'd find it odd but less vexing than calling a fully-grown dog a "puppy," possibly because I'm used to old people actually doing this completely innocently. However from Tess's perspective calling a full-sized dog "just a puppy" is probably more like calling a seventeen-year-old "just a child." Which still seems weird to me most of the time.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby CarrieVS » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:29 pm

jbobsully11 wrote:
cmsellers wrote:Nowadays, I get annoyed when people call dogs which have attained their full size "puppies." ...

I kind of agree with you on that one, although I find it less annoying. To me, it sounds only slightly less weird than calling an adult human a “baby.”


It's really more like calling a teenager who's pretty much adult height a kid.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby Anglerphobe » Sun Jan 21, 2018 8:41 pm

I'd be content with size being used as a basis to confer the rights of adulthood. Like those signs next to roller coasters; "you must be at least this tall to cast a ballot". I'm sure it would bear out well enough with dogs too.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Wed Jan 24, 2018 4:06 am

People from other countries "correcting" my use of "Eskimo" and telling me "they prefer 'Inuit'."

"Eskimo" is a term that collectively refers to the Inuit and Yupik. Most of the Eskimos in the US are Yupik, and their feelings on the matter tend to be similar to those of most Indians. "I'd prefer you call me by my nation's name, but if you can't I prefer [Indian/Eskimo]."

Now, it's absolutely true that the Inuit have requested that even when referring to the Inuit and Yupik collectively people use "Inuit" and the governments of Canada and Denmark, who have no Yupik citizens, do that. However it seems to me a bit like the English declaring the "British" is offensive and they'd prefer "English" to be used for all inhabitants of the British Isles.

I know very well what I'm doing, as an American I have good reason to do it, and yet whenever I explain this I still get into arguments with white people telling me it's offensive. Personally, I find the attempts of white people to engage in cultural imperialism against the Yupik offensive.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby SandTea » Wed Jan 24, 2018 5:53 am

"Sup Pup?" is something I often greet dogs with. I did not know that could annoy people. I can totally get being annoyed at owners who baby talk to their dogs though. Even if it is a puppy, that shit can get old, fast.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby Marcuse » Wed Jan 24, 2018 9:30 pm

cmsellers wrote:People from other countries "correcting" my use of "Eskimo" and telling me "they prefer 'Inuit'."

"Eskimo" is a term that collectively refers to the Inuit and Yupik. Most of the Eskimos in the US are Yupik, and their feelings on the matter tend to be similar to those of most Indians. "I'd prefer you call me by my nation's name, but if you can't I prefer [Indian/Eskimo]."

Now, it's absolutely true that the Inuit have requested that even when referring to the Inuit and Yupik collectively people use "Inuit" and the governments of Canada and Denmark, who have no Yupik citizens, do that. However it seems to me a bit like the English declaring the "British" is offensive and they'd prefer "English" to be used for all inhabitants of the British Isles.

I know very well what I'm doing, as an American I have good reason to do it, and yet whenever I explain this I still get into arguments with white people telling me it's offensive. Personally, I find the attempts of white people to engage in cultural imperialism against the Yupik offensive.


Except that when you used it, you used it in the context of the population of Greenland, which does not in fact contain Yupik. A fact you well knew if you were woke enough to know that Alaskan natives were Yupik.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby Ladki96 » Thu Jan 25, 2018 3:53 pm

I'm feeling a sense of deja vu... :P
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby DoglovingJim » Thu Jan 25, 2018 4:52 pm

Ladki96 wrote:I'm feeling a sense of deja vu... :P

Makes me wonder if cmsellers is getting corrected every day because somehow all of his conversations with people end up being about Eskimo's.
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Re: Pet peeves

Postby cmsellers » Thu Jan 25, 2018 5:34 pm

Ladki, I forgot I did that. Jim, I have no idea how I end up talking about Eskimos to Danes and Canadians so often. However it only takes one use of the word to invoke the urge to language-police.
Marcuse wrote:Except that when you used it, you used it in the context of the population of Greenland, which does not in fact contain Yupik. A fact you well knew if you were woke enough to know that Alaskan natives were Yupik.

I still don't see how that's remotely relevant. I was using it in the context of explaining who lived in Greenland, in contrast with Indians and Europeans. "Eskimo" is the maximally broad term which makes this distinction, as I pointed out in the conversation. It's also the more familiar term.

When it comes to the inhabitants of Greenland, I generally use the term "Greenlander," however for people who don't know who already live in Greenland that's uninformative. When it comes to the Inuit of Canada I generally use the term "Inuit," but there are contexts where "Eskimo" makes sense as well.

I think a broader pet peeve of mine is that, barring actual racial slurs, I don't think that it's the job of white people to police the language of other white people with regards to what brown people call themselves. I was exposed to too much crying wolf on this as a kid. As a kid growing up in a very PC part of the country, I was told that Indians prefer to be called "Native Americans," blacks prefer to be called "African Americans," and Eskimos prefer to be called "Inuit." I've since learned that most Indians and black people don't care, but most blacks who have a preference prefer "black" and every single Indian I've met who had a preference has preferred "Indian." ("Native American" is also a technical term in the US which covers both Indians and Alaska Natives, though I'd call Alaska natives who aren't Eskimo or Aleut "Indian" as well.) And of course I also learned that in the US, the majority of Eskimos prefer "Eskimo."

I had a classmate who was Tohono O'odham, and the Tohono O'odham definitely prefer to be called by their endonym in English. However I also know that the use of "Papago" isn't so horribly offensive that it requires me to police other people's language. If I heard someone mention the "Papago" I'd probably make sure to model correct usage by working "Tohono O'odham" into my response, but my reaction would not be to tell them "'Papago' is offensive and you should never use it." That's not my place, and also overstates dramatically how offensive the term actually is.
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Last edited by cmsellers on Thu Jan 25, 2018 6:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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