Subject: (urth) posting conventions (was GW and CP)

From: Dan <autarch at vippn.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 07:28:53 +0000

Sorry David, chastisement duly noted. I'll avoid any non-contextual 
abbreviations in the future. Coming across an acronym without any prior 
attribution annoys me as well.

Maru explained it better than I, since I wouldn't have thought to include 
the wiki links. Thanks Maru!

Dan

>Message: 1
>Date: Fri, 17 Jun 2005 00:27:00 -0400
>From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
>Subject: Re: (urth) gene wolfe and cyberpunk
>To: The Urth Mailing List <urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
>Message-ID: <f5238c305061621271b7c0e1e at mail.gmail.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
>Well, there you go: he has lapsed into anime vocabularly, so don't feel bad.
>
>In case you were wondering, GitS was discussed earlier- it is "Ghost
>in the Shell".
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_shell
>
>AS stands for the popular programming segment Cartoon Network airs
>late at night, called "Adult Swim".
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adult_Swim
>(The name comes form the fact that at night, the kids aren't watching
>so they can show more mature 'adult' stuff- kinda like a pool. Get it,
>adult swim=... ah never mind.)
>
>~Maru
>On a very side note, I'm surpised you don't like bottom-posting- every
>forum Usenet or otherwise, has told me to bottom post, and definitely
>not top- but you seem to prefer top, so I shall.
>
>On 6/16/05, David Kirby <dbkirby at pressroom.com> wrote:
> > Okay, the abbreviation "DADoES" is probably familiar enough to SF fans,
> > even without my inclusion above of the improbably capitalized "do
> > androids dream of electric sheep."
> >
> > But "GitS"? "AS"? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
> > (That statement may pin me as an ol' fogey -- the first time I've
> > been so pinned -- but I suspect many written SF contributors will
> > agree with its sentiment.) These may have been explained earlier
> > in the thread, but they aren't explained in this message, and they
> > should have been. One of the advantages of Usenet or mailing lists
> > is that a reader or participant doesn't have to know *everything*
> > that has gone before in order to participate. (Most Web-based
> > discussion forums I've seen don't have or don't encourage a
> > ["here's what I had to say" --> "here's what you respond"] format.)
> >
> > (Top-posting is also appreciated, if appropriate, although
> > "interleaved" posting is perfectly accepted when appropriate.
> > Bottom-posting is not appreciated and indicates, at least to
> > me, that you've not read carefully the post you're responding
> > to.)
> >
> > Can we, please, try to be a bit more inclusive in future
> > messages?
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> >        -- David
>

---

From: David Kirby <dbkirby at pressroom.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 13:08:11 +0000

Dan wrote:
> Maru explained it better than I, since I wouldn't have thought to 
> include the wiki links. Thanks Maru!

No problem. I'm just glad to get an answer.

Hey, you think you need chastised . . . .

I haven't looked at e-mail recently -- this is the first time since
I sent my note. I sent the earlier message both without sleep and in
the middle of a move. Which is to say --

Maru (and Jeff Wilson) called me on the top- vs. bottom-posting claim
I made, and they are both absolutely correct. *PLEASE* bottom post
rather than top post! ("Interleaving" is better than either -- the one
thing I got correct in my rant!) I don't know how my brain's synapses
managed to flip top- and bottom-, but they did. As authors say in
their "thanks to others" acknowledgments, I take full responsibility
for the mistakes made by my synapses.

I used to be an anime fan, some 20 years ago when I knew others who
were anime fans. I obviously haven't seen much recently. My loss.

On an unrelated but Wolfeian note: Do "chastise" and "chaste" share a
common root? I can think of a number of jokes if they do. The only hint
of such a connection that my _Random House Unabridged Dictionary_
(2d ed.) provides is this under "chastise": "3. _Archaic._ to restrain;
chasten. 4. _Archaic._ to refine, purify." Otherwise, the dictionary
traces "chastise" to Middle English and "chaste" to Middle English by
way of Old French by way of Latin. I haven't a clue.

Thanks for letting my abase myself!

       -- David

-- 
==============================================================
"It is possible I already had some presentiment of my future."
== Gene Wolfe, Shadow of the Torturer
                          David B. Kirby, dbkirby at pressroom.com
==============================================================

---

From: Maru Dubshinki <marudubshinki at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 21 Jun 2005 15:04:02 +0000

On 6/21/05, David Kirby <dbkirby at pressroom.com> wrote:
...
> Thanks for letting my abase myself!

I would never interfere in someone's posessions abasing themselves.
But fortunately, I, for my graduation, received a copy of the OED, and
I find that the chaste/chastise is apparently a fairly interesting bit
of philology; chaste, it is fairly sure, comes from the Old French (no
mention of Latin tho'), but chastise is completely different:
"An equivalent of the earlier CHASTE and CHASTY, the formation of
which is not easily accounted for. There is no recorded medieval Latin
"castizare", French "chastiser", and no Old French "chastir",
"chastiss-", the usual source of "-ise" and "-ize" in English verbs;
the word is too early to have been a simple English formation from
CHASTE a. + "-ise". The stress was originally alwyas on the first
syllable, is generally so with Shakespeare (7 times vs. 2)"....

~Maru
All your abase are belong to us