This board is begging for RO5.

This quotes thing is going to become a RO meme

It is actually what “Just a Minute” would call “English”. This is the language in which we are attempting to communicate, and has its own rules and conventions.

Unfortunately, I have no means of being sure what post you are responding to, as you have given no indication. I notice here that people overcome this by prefixig “@[someone]” to make a specific personal response.

Would you care to respond specifically?

Warning: Wall of text follows. ☺

If you have to put it in quotes, you’re probably not normal

The quotes was a guide – a nod to the fact that “normal” is a perceptual thing. That which one person considers normal, others may not. Who is right? The closest we have to collective “normal” are trends, fashions, things that multiple people do – jeans with ripped knees, Taytay CDs, weird hair, fitness bands…..but as some people deride them as sheeple or affectations, it is clear that even group “normal” is not necessarily “normal”.
We can’t even determine what should be normal by looking to what should be abnormal. For instance, injuring and murdering young girls ought to be abnormal to the point of reprehensible, yet only a short while ago a number of young girls were killed and maimed for the crime of liking Ariana Grande (they’d have been okay if it was a Nickelback concert…). But, wait, that was one nutjob, right? No. There are many around the world who violently discriminate against females, especially children. One can’t pick on the obvious religion – the nuns in children’s homes got up to some pretty horrible things, it seems. Yet, I’m sure, to all of these people, what they are doing is “normal” while to us it is abhorrent.

Thus, my question. Define “normal”. In quotes. Because it is a surprisingly nebulous concept.

my experience of special education informs me that a “label” or diagnosis is only useful if it signals a course of action which can improve “outcomes” for the individual concerned.

Please excuse me – this touches a nerve, so a long rant follows:

In my experience, labels and diagnoses are more a sort of crutch that really annoying people can use in order to be “offended” (look! quotes!) on behalf of those with actual problems. That’s why I have a selection of really poor taste jokes about special ed kids that I tend to tell when in the presence of people that make educational decisions about such children.
Why? I was one. And I got mighty sick of other people deciding for me what I could and couldn’t do, what I should and shouldn’t do, what I can and can’t do. But, here’s the first kicker, these bastards would make all these decisions after talking to me for, like, five minutes. And here’s the second kicker. They would justify their paycheque by creating lengthy reports of what ought to be done that was utterly inappropriate and utterly useless. To give an example, it was suggested that I should go to remedial English where I was expected to spell such exciting words as “cat” when I was fourteen and writing the very unofficial school newspaper (weekly, if I felt like it) that pretty much extracted the urine out of everything in sight. I went to the lesson once, spelled every single three and four letter word incorrectly, and got kicked out for not taking it seriously. So I was free to write an article on how to swipe pies from the refrigerator, and not needing a spelink cheqer for those complicated words. [I used EdWord, there was no spellcheck!]
Seriously, though, asking me to spell words like “cat” was just insulting. And, pray tell, when my primary issue was with numbers, exactly how would testing my spelling of anything be even remotely useful?
That’s education specialists in a nutshell – too damn useless to cut it as real teachers, too damn willing to exert their stupidity in other people’s lives. Because, as we know (look at the fallout from Grenfell) something must be seen to be being done, right?

I just pity the kids that had problems severe enough that their reading was so bad that by the time they reached the end of the sentence, they couldn’t remember the start. Wh eh n th ay re ee duh li eye kuh th ii ss (when they read like this) they stand little chance of actually understanding what it is they are reading. When they’re in third form reading like that, and they’re exactly the same at the end of fifth form when their education draws to a close. When you know that all the things they will have to read in life (agreements, contracts, etc) will prove to be a challenge. Maybe with better so-called experts, they might have been assigned proper one on one teaching to help them try to overcome obstacles. I was taught to read like that as well, but the person who did the most to teach me to read, and who instilled a love of literature (even if we disagree on what genre), my mother.

School? Oh yeah, that’s the place where teachers called me distruptive (I was bored), told me that I couldn’t read adult books at the age of 10 (clearly every ten year old needs a picture on every facing page), and nobody noticed I was quite short sighted until I was thirteen … which might have been a fairly large part of the impediment between my lack of understanding what was written on the board, and what I was supposed to write down myself, and again we’re back to the definition of normal. I thought my eyesight was normal as I had no experience of it otherwise. Turns out that the PE teacher told me, as a punishment, to run to the bollard and back. I said what bollard. He decided that I was way too wussy to smartmouth him, so he dragged me to the matron and told her to test my eyes.
In my life I had three teachers I respected. Mrs Roach, the only junior school teacher who accepted that I was capable of reading proper books. Mr… Carnel, I think. The computer studies teacher at boarding school who taught me a lot of stuff about the insides of the BBC Micro, including hitting one with a hammer so we could spend a weekend “fixing it” (actually, we did!). And Mr. Todd, my Physics teacher who taught me to question everything. Even that which ought to be obvious, question it until it can be proven.
Special shout out to Mz. Oakley, the chemistry teacher, that single-handedly introduced the concept of feminism to a boy’s boarding school. I believe the correct response ought to be “you go, girl” but then she’d probably tell me that the third word was a sexist use of a gender specific pronoun, not to mention the use of a word usually associated with children being used to refer to an adult (though, oddly enough, nobody seems to mind when it is used in the context of “girlfriend”?). Notice the “Mz” before her name. She was not a Mrs and she’d probably kill anybody who dared to call her “Miss” (cough, so accordingly, most of us did)….she was a Mzzzz.

Now, I would list all of the idiot teachers I’ve had in life, but I didn’t make a point of remembering their names. Just be assured, it’s a much larger list. Larger, even, than the “meh” teachers who failed to make much of an impression at all.

Okay, rant over.

leading a life of luxury on my various pensions with houses in two countries

England? Life of luxury? Nyahahahahaha!
You should have stayed over here, so you could qualify to remain post-Brexit…

But which of you is accessing my website from Iceland

Could be one of the Scots islands being misread as Iceland? IP addresses aren’t always so accurate. For mine, the region is correct (Brittany) but the place often quoted is some town about a hundred and fifty miles west of here. I guess that’s where Orange’s local backbone is located?
Oh, and if you get hits from Norway (or is it Finland? I don’t remember) then it is possible that it is somebody visiting your site using Opera in Turbo mode. The Opera server will fetch your content, squish it, and sling it to the browser in a special compressed form.

If an idea or suggestion is novel, I’d have a tough time not throwing caution to the wind.

I think a lot of people can get caught up in novel and interesting ideas. I am naturally cynical, but I’m sure the right idea would catch my interest. Isn’t it natural to want to be excited by interesting developments? Life can be more interesting that way, so long as you hone the sense of detecting snake oil and those peddling it.

Unfortunately, I have no means of being sure what post you are responding to, as you have given no indication.

I think he is referring generally to our placing certain words in quotes – “normal”, “friends”, “irony”, etc.

He wonders if it might become a “meme” (argh! quotes!). Maybe I ought to introduce him to the concept of scare quotes?

Long rant much appreciated, Rick. I was luckier: I had more teachers I respected, but I had a fair few of the others too, especially early on, and was also known for being disruptive. It was my beloved maternal grandfather and paternal grandmother who taught me to read – the former gave me a telescope and showed me the sky at night, and the latter gave me several (adult) books on astronomy (I was eight). That was all they needed to do (I only saw them a couple of times a year). “Oh – there’s interesting stuff in books, is there? Oh wow!”

I’ve also been lucky with educational psychologists – not when I was a child, but when I was a teacher, and again (briefly…) when I was the British Psychological Society’s Journals Manager. Some of them are really very good. And almost the only psychologists I’ve ever met (and during my career I’ve met a lot) whom I would describe as (a) sane, and (b) not charlatans.

And almost the only psychologists I’ve ever met (and during my career I’ve met a lot) whom I would describe as (a) sane, and (b) not charlatans.

I think the problem with a lot of psychologists is their clinical approach. At the end of the day, they’re talking to people, but they treat you like some pathology. They also ascribe meaning to almost everything. Personally, I use it as a suggestion to understand others better, but I don’t use it as a textbook on life.

Humans are too complex to have been figured out by psychologists. As a result, almost everyone you meet will be the exception to some principle in psychology. IMHO, you can’t follow it so heavily as some psychologists tend to do.