I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling this way, too, because it's certainly not a rational way of thinking but damn, it's real!
I actually came up with an analogy and then forgot to put it in my post, but I was thinking that finally having my icons on DW made the commenting easier and more...comfortable, I guess? And it's similar to what it's like when I'm talking to someone with whom I know I can code-switch into Russian. I am perfectly fluent in English! I can say all the things I want to say, to a suitable degree of precision, using English alone. Most of the time, I don't even use Russian when talking to most people who understand it, like my best friend, or B, or my brother, or my Russian-speaking flisters. But knowing that I can/i> switch into Russian, and have a whole additional set of nuances available to me, makes talking to people who are bilingual-like-me a subtly but importantly different experience. And having the icons for comments is like that, even if like 90% of the time I leave it on default.
And, yeah, when it was just me and the 15 icons on DW, it really felt like a site I was putting up with because I had to, as a number of folks had moved there completely,not even cross-posting. Now it actually feels like a place I can roost :)
Heh, I'm not sure I can fully appreciate your analogy, since I'm definitely still monolingual (in spite of all the languages I keep trying to study... maybe someday!), but yeah, there's definitely something about having icons that feels, as you said in your original post, "more like home." I think they really are almost like souvenirs or knickknacks displayed on some kind of imaginary shelf space, and I like seeing them there, and I like for other people to be able to "visit" and see what's on my imaginary shelves, too.
Ooh, I like this analogy, too, because it also works -- like, the difference between coming to visit my house, where I have all my stuff on the shelves and the walls, vs just visiting a hotel room I'm in -- I'm still here myself, of course, but the decor is not me at all :)
I actually came up with an analogy and then forgot to put it in my post, but I was thinking that finally having my icons on DW made the commenting easier and more...comfortable, I guess? And it's similar to what it's like when I'm talking to someone with whom I know I can code-switch into Russian. I am perfectly fluent in English! I can say all the things I want to say, to a suitable degree of precision, using English alone. Most of the time, I don't even use Russian when talking to most people who understand it, like my best friend, or B, or my brother, or my Russian-speaking flisters. But knowing that I can/i> switch into Russian, and have a whole additional set of nuances available to me, makes talking to people who are bilingual-like-me a subtly but importantly different experience. And having the icons for comments is like that, even if like 90% of the time I leave it on default.
And, yeah, when it was just me and the 15 icons on DW, it really felt like a site I was putting up with because I had to, as a number of folks had moved there completely,not even cross-posting. Now it actually feels like a place I can roost :)
Reply
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment