I was baffled by that line, so I posted to r.a.c asking what it meant. Was the comic set in an alternate universe or the future or something?<\/p>\n
\nOh, ARF!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
I read that as a hostile way of saying “How could anyone be so stupid as to not understand this?”—to be read in the same tone as someone saying “Oh, Christ!” while rolling their eyes.<\/p>\n
So I wrote back a stiff defensive note saying that I didn't see what I had done wrong, and that it seemed to me to be a reasonable question, and so on.<\/p>\n
And the other person gently pointed out that one of the regulars on the newsgroup was a British guy whose initials (which he went by regularly) were A.R.F., and that instead of a hostile eye-rolling sort of tone, the poster had intended it to be a calling-for-someone kind of tone—like “Hey, A.R.F., your attention is needed over here; someone is asking a question that you would be interested in answering!”<\/p>\n
I was embarrassed, because I had gotten all defensive for nothing, and because as a longtime reader of r.a.c I should've known about ARF.<\/p>\n
But the other poster could certainly have communicated better too. Without context, a two-word sentence starting with “Oh” and ending with a word in all-caps and an exclamation mark can often be read in a variety of tones and can often mean a variety of things.<\/p>\n
These days, I try to keep that kind of thing in mind when I read something that sounds to me like an indirect attack. But it's hard. Sometimes I notice the ambiguity and explicitly ask the writer what they meant; sometimes I start to write a long defensive response and it's only when I re-read the original phrase that I realize it was ambiguous; sometimes I still miss the ambiguity, or decide I must be interpreting it right, and send the defensive response, and only later learn that I misunderstood.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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