Yes words can have any meaning at all. Also War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.

Edit: this is a 1984 reference for those who aren’t familiar with that book or haven’t read it.

From your user page: "My name is actually CyberRabbit. I made a typo when I made this account and HN won’t let me edit my user name."

There is no user "CyberRabbit" by the way, maybe dang would rename your account if you ask him?

Yes he offered but I don’t use email and cannot contact him that way.

It's too late now anyway

That was actually pretty mean.

hehe.

I’m not sure which way your email joke is going. Is it poking fun at some HNers who go out of their way not to use common services or devices, or, are you joking that changing your username isn’t worth any effort?

Edit: oh. Likely a 1984 reference. Never mind now. Leaving comment as it is though

For reference, maybe calibration:

I parsed his profile line as a disambiguation.

Something like:

My handle is not cyber-"rabbi", so ignore the religious overtones.

I intended "rabbit" and did it wrong. The UI has this irritating quirk, but I'm not motivated to enough to really fix it.

Not that important.

I’m not sure why people in this thread keep thinking my comments are jokes. What is causing that? I literally do not use email.

It’s because of the two options I proposed. Both being HN-y things.

You sticking to your guns and not using cookies or JS shows me your principles are legit.

Normally and what my comment was referencing, are people who tout one abnormal or specific thing they do or don’t do. Like how awful FB or one of its properties are. While they happily go on every other data and privacy invading site/company.

A lot of what you're saying is hard to take seriously, because it's just plain bizarre. A complete refusal to use email for any purpose is pretty unusual to begin with, and even more so for a participant on a technical forum like this. Publicly complaining about the consequences of that decision is another layer of strange behavior. It seems like you're putting a lot of effort into not communicating effectively, so you really should expect people to have trouble taking your statements at face value.

> A complete refusal to use email for any purpose is pretty unusual to begin with

I don’t know if I would say I “refuse” to use email. I simply opt not to because I am privacy conscious. I also do not browse the web with cookies or JavaScript enabled. If that’s “bizarre” to you well then I guess I am a bizarre person but I deserve a bare minimum of respect just as all humans do.

> Publicly complaining about the consequences of that decision is another layer of strange behavior.

I literally never complained about anything. Someone else initiated a question at me about my communication with dang and I shared the results of that communication. I am not bothered at all by not being able to request a name change nor have I ever expressed resentment towards anyone for not being able to request a name change. My screen name is not very important to me. I feel like I am being unfairly judged here.

For what it's worth, I haven't watched TV since the 80's and people assume that I am militant or insane.

It is weird to not have watched any TV in decades. However the coworking community I run online funnily enough has some of the youngest members (early 20s) who do not get any references I make. They also seemingly watch no tv at all. Limited YouTube as well so not like that’s replacing it for them.

It hasn’t been a second thought of that being something to point out.

However I guess in an in person situation, it may come up more as a “thin”

I get the reference, but it seems like either a non-sequitur or a joke I'm not getting.

It’s not a non-sequitor nor a joke, the point is to highlight the danger of linguistic relativism. If we dismiss the idea that words must follow some standard meanings, things we value can be gradually shifted into weapons of oppression.

You're seriously overthinking this. Descriptivism isn't some plot to twist our cherished language, it just describes the language as it is currently used by speakers.

I believe there needs to be serious limits on the ability of “descriptivists” to condone divergent meanings of words. Within reason it is fine to describe new slightly expanded uses of words but wholesale accepting that word meanings can change arbitrarily in principle seems harmful to the maintenance of the integrity and quality of our language. For example, many people dislike HOAs but neighborhoods with HOAs maintain a certain level of quality, while neighborhoods without HOAs have quality levels across the board, including very bad.

And who decides what these standard meanings are?

It doesn’t matter who decides, it only matters that a decision has been made and that is it respected and enforced. Generally academics and/or intellectuals edit dictionaries