Right. And even the hostility isn’t always ‘hostile’. Even with emoticons and the most careful phrasing, if a person feels offended, they will often complain of a post’s ‘hostile tone’. It is almost impossible in today’s climate to be able to say anything which is perceived of as a contradiction because it offends somebody who feels differently.
And of course, sometimes an explanation of why something ‘is’, is perceived of as deliberate and mean ‘offense’ when a person offers a ‘different’ concept, even when they give reasons.
Most everybody today believes that fish, being a living creature, is ‘meat’. The fact that centuries ago the best scientific minds judged differently, making a difference between ‘hot blooded creatures’ and ‘cold blooded creatures’ and thus that the term we can LOOSELY translate as ‘meat’ did not mean the same thing as the English word ‘meat’ does in 21st century terms, is seldom greeted with, “Oh, really? I didn’t know that. Now I see why the Church allows fish to be considered not meat. Even though today we consider it meat, and as vegetarians would consider fish as much meat as chicken or beef etc., there were different guidelines in effect back then. And of course, even now, Catholics do not HAVE to eat fish. They can refrain from the ‘meat’ in the old definition, from the ‘fish’ under a current definition, and they can have just vegetables and grains and nothing ‘living’ at all”.
It is far more common to see, “So WHAT? The Church was STUPID to call fish not meat when it is clearly not meat. It’s confusing and I don’t care WHY they did it. I want them to change the rules and the definition to suit MY understanding, even though nobody HAS to eat fish if they don’t wish to.”
Now in my opinion, the first example is not hostile at all, while I find the second to be a little snippy, but you are going to find plenty of people who will say that first example is ‘snobby’, and ‘demeaning’ and ‘hostile’, and will claim the tone of the second example was in response to the ‘hostility’ of the first example. It’s all based so much, for some (not all), on EMOTION. Not on the actual definition or explanation, but on whether it FEELS to me whether somebody is being disrespectful of my FEELINGS.
It’s kind of tiresome that so often perfectly reasonable posts like woolybabe’s wind up getting so much emotionalism thrown around them, when really, the answer is very simple. People did not necessarily have the same meaning for a word years ago that they do today, (ask anybody if the Flintstones having a ‘gay old time’ meant in 1960 that Fred and Barney were homosexual --I think not). That doesn’t mean they were wrong then, or that every instance of the word needs to be either completely eradicated or ‘retroactively changed’ to suit the current times. . .again, in my opinion.
