Re: Comment Catcher: Don't Change the Game: Towards Better Allyshipoedipamaas49November 26 2016, 22:48:25 UTC
I wish this were more of a norm everywhere. Good to have it stated explicitly
[OT: i'm surprised by your intuition that "I doubt anybody has ever in your entire lives suggested that changing a conversational topic is ever impolite". Not just because it was drummed into me as a kid, but also because, look, everyone understands this "OT" thing I just did here]
Except that *in person* people frequently think the opposite - that changing the topic is an actual good thing. For instance when your racist uncle is being a racist arse it is usually considered "more polite" to steer the conversation towards some neutral topic like the weather than to actually engage with the topic and have a row about racism.
Heh. A good point. Though to unpack that a bit, it's "more polite" than the other options which might leap to mind, like yelling at the uncle, swearing at him, laying him out across the sideboard with a right cross, or throwing a pie in his face. It's "more polite" than joining the battle at the diningroom table to disrupt his discourse precisely so that he doesn't get to talk about what he wants to.
And I promise, if he was just getting to building up a head of steam on his favorite topic, about how those [redacted] are all [redacted], unless you are amazingly skillful about inventing attractive derails[*], he will be peevish that you changed the topic out from under him.
[* True story time: when I was an undergrad, I had a bio prof who loved to tell Linus Pauling stories. By the end of the term, many members of my class had figured out that if they just didn't feel like having a bio lecture at any given moment, all they had to do was ask a question that had anything to do with Linus Pauling, and that was it for the rest of the
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[OT: i'm surprised by your intuition that "I doubt anybody has ever in your entire lives suggested that changing a conversational topic is ever impolite". Not just because it was drummed into me as a kid, but also because, look, everyone understands this "OT" thing I just did here]
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And I promise, if he was just getting to building up a head of steam on his favorite topic, about how those [redacted] are all [redacted], unless you are amazingly skillful about inventing attractive derails[*], he will be peevish that you changed the topic out from under him.
[* True story time: when I was an undergrad, I had a bio prof who loved to tell Linus Pauling stories. By the end of the term, many members of my class had figured out that if they just didn't feel like having a bio lecture at any given moment, all they had to do was ask a question that had anything to do with Linus Pauling, and that was it for the rest of the ( ... )
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