Quote:
Originally Posted by haertig
You are getting closer to understanding my point, but you're not quite there yet. I will try to restate it slightly differently: There are so many different genres of books, and letters in the gender/sex alphabet that I was using as a comparison, that even someone claiming to be part of the group they represent doesn't know if what I typed is real or not (e.g., your admission of "If I'm wrong...") This is a fine example to illustrate my point that there are too many subclassifications to be useful to the general public. Many people not personally invested in one of these book genres, or gender/sex alphabet letters as a comparison, don't know what it's supposed to mean. Too many subclassifications to remember, thus not very useful. Which was the point.
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I see I should be less subtle when I try to be snarky. To be more explicit: I'm sure your letter salad was pulled out of thin air. I still think that amounts to mockery.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DiapDealer
No. You've only illustrated that you feel there are too many subclassifications to be useful to you. Besides... they don't all need to be useful to the general public to still be useful (and even valuable) to many.
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Yes, exactly! I don't get why haertig seems to misunderstand you.
haertig, say someone coins a new term for a subgenre today.
* picks up a dictionary, opens it at random, looks for an adjective... OK, "herbal" * Say someone decides that
-- hmm, herbal literature, herbal fantasy, herbal crime, herbal horror, that's nicely alliterative, let's go with that -- "herbal horror" is a useful term to describe something that is, to them, an interesting subset of books. I've no idea what kind of books that would be. I don't read much horror, so odds are that's not a genre for me, but if I stumbled across a blog post describing this genre I'd be intrigued enough to skim it. If it sounded like something I want to read, I'd have a new search term when looking for books. If not, I'd ignore it. If I searched for books some other way, and found a book which was tagged with "herbal horror" in addition to terms I knew and liked, I wouldn't let an unfamiliar term keep me from reading it, although the "horror" part might make me look a bit closer before I chose to buy it.
Same with gender and sexuality. There are terms I don't know for some of the subtler nuances of those. But as long as those terms are useful to some people, they don't need to be useful to me.
When I come across an unfamiliar term, I'll either ask, look it up, try to infer the meaning from context, or ignore it. Its existence doesn't harm me.