I think you may have missed my point. When intelligent people swear, one of two things has happened: either their minds have "failed open" at the incongruity or sheer stupidity of a situation, and they lose control for a while over their words, or they are attempting to make a point with someone on the other end of the conversation who is at present (in the swearer's opinion) quite possibly well-informed on the topic but, nonetheless, so wrong as to require a very rough re-calibration of their thought processes.
For me,to the most part. I see those who swear as people who simply lack the capacity to full express themselves and they resort to swearing to cover up their deficiencies.To them,i say,"pick up a literature book and start reading or something".As a person who live in a English speaking country with English not being my first and comfortable language to converse in, i can appreciate how annoying it is to know what i want to say but not coming up with proper words and language structure to say it properly.Being stuck in a middle of sentence is not fun,plugging in a curse word as a substitute is being cheap.
At the end of the day,people do what they are allowed to do and as long as people give him a pass at it,he will keep on using this kind of language.Do others use this kind of language to others and to him in the mailing list?
He is a troll and an abuser his position. There is quite a bit of misogynistic sentiments in his comment and everybody will look pass it because he is who he is and is "fighting the good fight".
Its time to stop posting these kinds of "news".They do nothing but glorify bad behaviors the rest of us will be called out on if engaged in kind.
I see what you are saying and even tend to agree in sentiment, but I would ask that we not get into whether Linus is being misogynistic, misandristic, homophobic, or whatever - imputing emotions or sentiments to another person based on his or her choice of words is a slippery business, and seldom yields accurate results. Beyond that, and more importantly, it accomplishes little. I've seen so much of this erupt into endless drivel on other boards with little to show for it but column inches full of sound and fury signifying nothing.
I personally excuse this as understandable anger over what is a
monumental mistake on the part of well-meaning folks trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe that's because I learned a long time ago to attempt to look beyond the words used to deliver a message and try to get at the content of the message, especially if the speaker is angry, disturbed, or perturbed. (It ain't always easy, as some of my past posts will bear out.)
As a side note: why is it when people learn a new language, curse words are among some of the first learned? Is it something perverse in human nature, or is it that the concepts behind curse words are universal? Japanese has very few actual curse words, for example, but has many words or phrases that one would not wish to utter with undue emphasis lest they become curses. (This ties in with the Japanese belief in
Kotodama, a notion that words have a certain intrinsic power unto themselves, but also with the idea that one's tone of voice implies more about their feelings or attitude than the actual words used.)
Well, I've gotten woefully off track here. Language is fascinating stuff. Let's wrap it up. Linus definitely made his feelings about this matter known in no uncertain terms - that was his stated aim, and stems from his unique background and his own experiences. Like it or not, he's the man in charge of the kernel, and he has to herd the cats that do the coding. If it were any of us in his place, we'd probably curse more often, just not publicly, maybe.
