TBAY and diversity, continued and long

[Doriane]

Sorry for being so late to answer this, but real life holidays kept me
off the Net for a whole week now (not to mention that I wouldn't stand
a chance of winning a fight with my husband for the use of the home
computer, but he's away right now, so... <jk> ;-)

Haggridd wrote:

> Corect me if I misunderstand you, but I infer from what you have 
> written that, in the interests of some vague goal of inclusivity, 
> you would destroy all that diversity which you previously celebrated.

No ! No no no, not at all. Quite the contrary, actually.

> Why must there be one set of symbols, metaphors what have you on 
> this list?

I obviously wasn't clear enough, because that's exactly what I've come
to realise we shouldn't try and enforce.

>  Who says that this so-called "WCAS" background is excluding persons 
> of any background from understanding and/or participating in any 
> thread, including TBAY?

I'm not saying it's excluding people, preventing them from
understanding. I'm just saying that people who come from different
backgrounds might understand things in different ways, and that this
should be OK.  I was defending the fact that though JKR wrote her book
from a specific background, and though most people on the list share
that same background, we shouldn't expect everyone to grasp all the
details of that background.

> You are advocating a course of action similar to those idiot editors 
> at Scholastic who eliminated the orition British idioms-- yea, even 
> the title-- in PS because the poor, befuddled Americans couldn't cope
>  with jumpers and triners and the like.

If it had been up to me, I would have kept the British text, word for
word, and maybe included a glossary at the end, but only because it
was published as a children's book.

>  A great part of the charm of reading the book is to see the diffent 
> modes of expressing the same ideas ON THEIR OWN TERMS.  Likewise, 
> understanding a post from a liste from Israel, on the poster's own 
> terms, is more enjoyable simply for the difference of mindset and 
> backrground, and how it afects the language of the post.

I'd like to point out that you've only expressed your own opinion. I'm
pretty sure that there are people on this list, like in every social
group, who don't want to be bothered with understanding another
poster's background or mindset. They rarely show it on this list
because it's not the spirit of the list, but I'm sure some people
won't read a post from an Israeli listee if it requires them to accept
another mindset. And I myself was doing exactly that with the TBAY
posts, before I realised what I was doing.

> The same with this invention of yours, the WCAS-- which is by no 
> means as homogenousor monolithic as you would make it.

Wow, sorry it angered you that much... And no, I wouldn't make it
monolithic. In fact, I probably wouldn't make it at all, if I had to
explain it in details :-)

> Why force all listees into the same mold, one of which that 
> the "inclusivity police would approve?

??? That goes completely against my purpose ! In the name of
inclusivity, I request that nobody be forced into a specific mold,
that nobody be expected to understand the books in a specific way,
even if that way happens to be the hugely majoritarian way of
understanding of the listees as a whole. 

Del, who thanks Dicentra for defending her :-)