Markup View

Author: Unknown Troper

Sep 7th 2008 at 12:58:54 AM

"I've always been quite thrown by the term Fan Wank, as, much like the Order of the Stick example above, there's usually discord between it and the tone of the environment it's being used in. Yet I'm rarely offended by swearing (and swear enough myself) so it's more about the bizarre clash of politeness level than the word being used."

-This guy's figured it out. This is NOT, repeat NOT about whether a word is "offensive" or "acceptable" to you, me, him, or the average American, Australian or Mongolian.

It's a given that different words are considered more or less acceptable in different cultures. This already comes under Values Dissonance (or is it Moral Dissonance? Who can tell?). This is different in that this involves a writer borrowing a word from another vernacular without realising how strong (or alternatively, how silly, or how wrong) it is in that culture. This can create a mood dissonance (or, as the guy said above, a "clash of politeness level") when the work is read by somebody from the culture he took the word from.