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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Raven Crowking" data-source="post: 3624250" data-attributes="member: 18280">What do you mean you hate dogs?  And what, exactly, do you have against Nebraska?It is true that the writer has the responsibility to communicate effectively with his target audience (which is not always "as many people as possible").  However, effective communication is, and always has been, communicating in such a way that a listener/reader who takes the responsibility of attempting to understand the speaker/writer can do so (or nearly do so).  The days of believing that the reader/listener is a passive being, and that full responsibility falls upon the writer/speaker are long gone.  Communication is a dynamic, multi-party process.There is scant indication that this is the case, though, which has already been addressed:There is a difference between reaction and meaning, which are conflated here.When I say, for example, "pokemount", it conveys a specific meaning. It conveys a denotation of this edition's paladin's mount, and a strong connotation of my distaste for the current edition's version of the paladin's mount. It might also provoke a reaction which, IMHO, seems nothing more than "How dare you express a distaste for the current edition's version of the paladin's mount?" Possibly with an irrational conflating that distaste with a distaste for the game system as a whole, or with those who like the current edition's paladin's mount. However, I don't know of a single example where the term "pokemount" was intended to carry this secondary connotation. Nor, frankly, do you need to use the term "pokemount" to garner the same reaction -- you need merely to imply a distaste for the current edition's version of the paladin's mount.Moreover, if it is true that if one feels that a term iss a loaded statement, part of the requirement in having a balanced conversation once the term gets used is to be able to tell the other person why one felt it was a loaded statement, that it has taken so long for anyone to explain why "pokemount" or "MagicMart" are considered offensive seems to indicate to me very strongly that the idea that they are offensive is itself irrational.This is not unlike my question to Hussar about MagicMart as a descriptive term.  If MagicMart is not viable as a descriptive term, under what circumstances would MagicMart be viable as a descriptive term?This is simply, IMHO, a case of moving goalposts.  No matter what, these terms are "offensive", "mythical", "legendary", or "not descriptive".Ourph put it far more concisely than I when he said "For every buzzword you take off the table, the hypersensitive "wrongbadfun" police will find another word to get upset about. The problem isn't the words; it's the reaction."RC</blockquote>

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