Tone

Tone plays a vital part in conversation, you can call your chinese friend "Jackie Chan", but in most other contexts it would be racist. This is obvious. It's fundamental. That nickname for a friend should have no hateful undertones, and that should be apparent.

That in mind, people don't seem to understand tone. It's really obvious, or at least you'd think it was. But it isn't. There are some people who really don't understand tone, and that worries me. I have straightface told somebody that I accidentally burned down a factory and killed 15 people, and I said it so casually that you'd assume it was a joke (particularly with the "16 if you could the unborn baby in the pregnant woman" line as an afterthought) but in this case, it was not so. I mean, at what point do you truly believe that an individual you are familiar with could non-chalantly drop some news that he burned 16 people to death? Surely on some level you must realise the tone, and understand that it doesn't quite fit.

And another person, who, on Facebook, saw her ex-boyfriend had joined a group playfully (or bitterly, depending on your outlook) titled "wanting to machine gun down your ex", and thought 'That is most certainly a death threat'. Yes, that facebook group with a few thousand people in it, that public facebook group, is a death threat. I mean, the police were even contacted, and assumably they said that the situation was retarded, and some people needed to stop wasting their time. But it didn't stop there, lectures were transferred from, contact with tutors. Over a facebook group. It's very egocentric to assume it's about one particular ex - he had a few ex's, and better yet the murder weapon, a machine-gun, yes, what an easily acquired piece of kit, they sell those on street corners and in vending machines. I don't see how that tone translates, somebody said it was ridiculous, somebody was scolded for not taking that facebook group death-threat seriously.

Then there's trolling. A serious tone, but easily detectable over long periods of time. I sat in a lecture writing "Women are only good for cleaning and childbirth" and baited a lovely girl I was sat next to. For the next two hours I filled that page with the most hateful, masogynistic crap I could think of, and at the end nearly was shiv'd (an actual death threat, which was hilarious). It's all ironed out now (which is why she's a lovely girl, and not "the woman who is filing formal complaints") and under the circumstances, the tone was perfect.

Seriously, and this only applies to a handful of people I know in real life, who don't read this blog anyway, so as to whom I am addressing here I am unsure, but seriously, just think for a second. Just one. Because I'm tired of sighing.