About half the posts and comments I see are referencing things I've never heard of and sound like complete gibberish. Whole comment chains full of in jokes and weird quotes.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2025
40 points (93.5% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36510 readers
1636 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Happens to me every time I read an article on quantum physics. Pretty sure the universe is just messing with us at this point.
And there's a small but significant number of people on the internet who use "can" and "can't" interchangeably.
Pretty much every time I stumble across a post from tumblr, yeah.
The post you linked to is written extremely poorly, clearly by someone who would absolutely fail any writing class. They are very poor at writing in all aspects. Also they integrated references and slang.
What?
This post made me think of it as it’s a good example of this.
That particular post is a combination of poor English grammar, is deeply referential to pop culture, and also has missing/skipped/misspelled words. Don't feel bad its hard to parse.
Here is his post corrected:
No it’s because I don’t leave my house anymore unless I’m going to work or grocery shopping . Also because I haven’t been drinking at bars, and I don’t use apps. My carapace ~~may~~ is not ~~be~~ as chitinous as a xenomorph (referencing the 1970s and 80s Ridley Scott/James Cameron movies Alien/Aliens where the aliens had exoskeletons and acid blood), and I don't have ~~me~~ a heart beating with the acid blood ~~,~~ . ~~but~~ Instead my personality is books and jokes, ~~and~~ but at least I don’t reproduce parasitically…(wait…shit I guess we do…)
Does that make sense now?
I'm pretty sure OP is referring to the screenshotted text, not the first comment in the thread.
The sample provided isn't typical English communication. Context is critical. Use of language as well.
It's not you. It's them.
Perhaps someone "in the know" can help you understand the context and explain the missing subtext. I certainly couldn't. That post was confusing for many more reasons than one.
I understood it with context clues. Reading things on the internet definitely feels like I am reading an entirely different language sometimes.
Sometimes when I am scrolling past things, I pickup the words wrong because the words are matched to the look of a word instead of what the word says because I am not actively reading. That results in me reading headlines very wrong because my stupid brain filled in too many gaps and error corrected the headline to say wild shit. I scroll up to find out more and see the mistake. ~~I wish I had an example.~~
Example: "Snow flurries are rare in US south – now a blizzard has hit"
I read that as "Snow furries are rare in US south – now a blizzard has hit"
The headline makes sense, but the entire meaning changes entirely because my brain gave me the wrong word.
Without knowing the details or the reality of what is being discussed, I found the post pretty easy to parse:
there's some trend where people are putting pictures of people/things they want to bone on cakes, women are putting all sorts of weird stuff on the cake, therefore the problem isn't how attractive/unattractive you are.
It's targeted at incels, it's funny, and it makes sense even if I have no idea about the apecifics or if it ever really happened.
If someone on the internet can't make heads or tails of this, I worry about their media literacy.
Seems it was culture in your example. Culture may give new meanings to words. You don't know one, you can look it up. But if you don't know five words at once, you are lost.
Yes! And if one doesn't know different definitions are used, one won't know to look them up.
There are also "terms of art", which are normal words that take on new meaning within a a field. Sometimes these are multiple words that otherwise could have meaning. These appear in legal writing, but also in programming and other areas.
I found that text difficult to parse, due to a relative lack of punctuation. This means that I spent my energy trying to parse the sentences and my brain struggled to engage with the meaning and significance of the text. Maybe if I tried reading it again a few more times, I'd find it easier to follow and therefore easier to understand.
Maybe it's just as well that I never tried to read any Joyce. Or maybe if I'd tried, then I'd be better prepared for this. 🤷
I have a nephew that I'm certain has some flavor of a schizo affective disorder. When he's in the thick of it I cannot for the life of me figure out what he's trying to communicate to me, which makes me very sad
Generally, if you know the meaning of all words, and the grammar is correct, you should be able to read and understand it.
Most of the time the problem is that you don't know the meaning of all words.
Even if you know one possible meaning of every word in the sentence, words can have multiple meanings and you're probably unaware of that which the author meant.
Yes, sometimes i am unable to process the meaning of sencente despite knowing eveey word
In my second language, yes. Sometimes I just lack the specific cultural references to understand the phrase. In english, no. Can’t say i’ve ever confused myself with a sentence unless it was meant to be confusing (eg garden path sentences).
Shakespeare, or really any writing from that era takes me many read throughs to understand it.
I understood the reference post as I'm far too deep into degenerate internet culture, but I have definitely experienced what you say. I think sometimes people write in a way that simply doesn't welcome people not on their wavelength. And that's okay!.. as long as they don't expect broad understanding.