Asklemmy

What the fuck are you talking about?

It just seemed you were taking an idiom literally.

I was discussing being offended by an idiom because of its connotations, but you’re talking about motivating employees with loud noises. This seems to me like you’re offended by the idiom’s denotation.

So, do you call the local animal shelter when it’s raining very hard, assuming literal cats and dogs are falling from the sky and need homes? :)

(Please don’t take any of that too seriously, I wasn’t trying to be malicious and life is far too short!)

I worry that I didn’t properly communicate my thoughts in my first post, since in your reply to me you seemed to think I was placing blame on the receiver of offensive speech.

I assure you, I’m not blaming anyone for being offended. I would hope that, as language and communication are both complicated and all of us are, quite literally, constantly learning to be better at it, some measure of grace might be extended all around as long as people operate in good faith.

If someone is genuinely offended by something I say, that is not their fault. It means I was careless in what I said, did not properly gauge my audience, or, far more often in my own life experience, spoke in ignorance. Like the time I made a “your mom” joke to a coworker whose mother had died when he was a child. I was ignorant of that fact, and so something this is obviously rude but intended to be playful was received in a way I had not anticipated.

In that circumstance, this coworker informed me and I apologized, and never again made a “your mom” joke to him. But at the same time, he understood that most people our age at the time had living mothers, and was therefore not angry with me. Grace was extended, because life is hard and it isn’t worth being upset when we can get along.

Another time I was speaking to a Jewish coworker and asked about her interpretation of the creation account in Genesis, and was then comparing it with the interpretation of my devout Christian parents. I was genuinely curious, but she later told me that it offended her that I so cavalierly talked about her holy text in a way that seemed to imply shared ownership. Perhaps she thought I was trying to evangelize (I was most certainly not).

To me, this exchange is still somewhat baffling to this day. Both religions read and interpret the Torah, surely she knows that fact already? But I still don’t blame her for being offended. That reaction wasn’t something she decided on. Instead it taught me to be a little more gentle in the way I talk to people about their religion until I know them better.

Circling back around, the idiom “crack the whip” is nearly always, at least in my experience, tongue in cheek. And is usually somewhat ironic: the person saying “I should go crack the whip” is also not working when they say it, after all. To me, it evokes a carriage driver who has become distracted talking to someone and realizing they should be driving the horses.

I fully comprehend that isn’t how everyone may view the idiom, and idioms by their inherently non-literal nature can be subject to broad interpretation. So that particular idiom I avoid using. My entire point was to say that this OP, asking for a list of offensive phrases, is taking an important step in learning to communicate better: they are realizing the onus is on them to avoid offending others.

Now, all of that said, there is equally a responsibility on my part as a listener to allow for grace when someone offends me if I have no reason to assume malice. That is to say, if some relatively thin person says around me, “Ugh, I’m so fat” while looking in a mirror, my initially emotional reaction is to be offended by their ostensible declaration that being fat is disgusting and that therefore they must find me, a much fatter person, so much more disgusting.

But what’s probably happening there is that this person is expressing their own insecurity. One that I share, which is why it offended me. Yes, there’s an outside chance that this person is trying to be a dick and insult me in a roundabout way, but people are usually too self-centered and merely insensitive rather than malicious. So it’s better for me to apply the best interpretation of what they’re expressing and go through life happier.

Anyway, I’m sorry if I offended you! :)