Small talk !== Gossip. God, it's obnoxious reading like 98% of you.
You think "stuff I'm not interested in" is gossip, which is even worse than the assumption "Small talk === Gossip".
Look, adding a qualification or narrative component (predicates not strictly quantifiable over the domain) is a mark of conversation.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
AGAIN:
BUILDING RAPPORT is NOT GOSSIP.
VAGUENESS is not gossip.
It's SYSTEMATIC oppression. A laundry list of "why this, why this" at the end of a post COMPLETELY FAILS to grok what SYSTEMATIC/STRUCTURAL oppression MEANS.
Learn how to more categories of conversation. LEARN what speech genres are. Stop reducing everything to "gossip/actionable". Stop the elimination of human spontaneity. Stop building the ideal language that the ideal person must speak.
Please don't repeat lines several times for emphasis.
Please avoid assessments of the people writing comments (or call them "obnoxious"); focus instead on the arguments that dismay you.
It's unfortunate because I think there are probably valid points in this comment, but they've been worded in such a way that even people who disagree with you will be repelled.
"Why you Borklandian yorlix, hasn't everyone been slashed or thwacked with a magic wand or had a morningstar or two broken over their head as a kid? Shit, if that's the worst thing your Mother did, you should consider yourself fate-blessed and smooch the ground she hovers over because you probably deserved it.
Fracking wurtbag..."
Scrape CL, apply a lexical categorizer (porting Syntactic[0] to Python now), pseudo-randomize, apply Tangle[1] as a front end; allow users to scale between language species-norms over categories and submit their creations, apply a speech-to-text tool, there's a voting board involved.
The point here is that I find prescriptive morality to be quite droll. Upon reading this HN title, I immediately dashed over the CL to see if any analogues might exist. The CL in my State took on a characteristic countertone to this HN post. I intuited this immediately. The output post above is a follow-up to the OP [on CL], where the output post is consistent with the HN OP. But there's more hilarity now.
Goal: Use "nerd" activities to diffuse prescriptivism. Now I have a port to consider and maintain.
"Everyone carries a room about inside them. This fact can be proved by means of the sense of hearing. If someone walks fast, and one pricks up one's ears, and listens, say in the night, when everything round about is quiet, one hears for instance the rattling of a mirror not quite firmly fastened to the wall."
I repeated this to myself, out loud, 100 times. The goal was to simultaneously maintain another persistent stream of thought as I recited, religiously.
The next day I converted my left control key to Backspace, months after asking myself in earnest the question of what I should do with my left control key now that I had already delegated that role to my caps lock. Days later I learned that a co-worker has worked on a keyboard missing its Backspace for years now.
As a practicing psychonaut one must, in order to ascend the order of skills, learn to master speech in a way that is disorderly from other cognitive functions. But first, what is speech must be recognized.
I think with keyboards, we experience much of them same thing: where Backspace becomes a word or a character of one's textual lexicon. It's just a matter of where you put it (let's say, "in your mind"). It's like the paralanguage of "uhms" and "wells" which litter everyday academic to grocery language, cheerily grows in programmers' circles, and then those pauses to reset the conversation of their weed like proliferation.
We do not always know what we are saying because most of the time the meanings are quantifiably outside of the grammar with which our brains have adapted for the purposes of internally efficient speech. Each of us constructs an idiolect for our use, and the semantic edifice wrapping our words which we use to exercise thought often bears signs of the issues we have dealt with, not necessarily in learning the language, but also building it for our individual purposes. Sometimes the constructs we internally put together are resistant to forms of complexity that are outside of the cowpaths we have paved for ourselves.
Very true, you are very aware how we think. But I am hesitant to say it since I may be encouraging your behavior, depending on how it is manifested. Be careful, because as you look in, the abyss stares into you. So depending on how you see your behavior, you may want to discourage thinking in this manner.
Here I say a better model for the Universe is not matter but information, an information architecture of the universe. Matter is buggy, less elegant, event-driven (whereas emergence (acausality) might help).
We're investigating exponentially more if we remain vigilant in preserving the materialist's conceptual scheme.
