It seems to me that the world is growing steadily ruder. As we grow more and more stressed and less connected to those around us, we increasingly, it seems, have less time for civility. (Review of Talk to the Hand: the utterly bloody rudeness of everyday life (or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door).)
I rarely engage with online chat forums (or fora, sorry… Truss’s previous book was ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ which extolled the virtues of grammar, she would recoil at my use of the word ‘forums’). As a medium, they are designed to maximise rudeness. If you wanted to debate an issue , you wouldn’t enter a darkened room to engage in thoughtful conversation with an unknown number of people with masks on. In the same way, being hidden behind ridiculous names like hotdog18 and vortexman seems to give people permission to be unspeakably rude to each other.
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