alt Hacker NewsI'd put it the other way around: Bad Grammar is a courtesy. I run a startup that's small, but busy. I get a high frequency stream of inbound questions, notifications and asks to make decisions by my team and customers. If I don't respond or decide quickly I become a bottleneck. Likewise, if I wait, things pile up. So, rather than keep everyone waiting for me, I make a point of pulling my phone out as soon as I get a message and provide an answer straight away as much as possible. These answers are brief and to the point. And they are laden with shitty grammar. But they are almost instant and that feels better than a well formulated essay two hours later.
Having said that, I started using Gmail's "polish" feature to turn "yes" into "That sounds great, let's go ahead with it" or some such corporatism. Not sure if that's much better...
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> Bad Grammar is a courtesy.
I agree. Or at least to the extent that the complaint is that bad grammar signifies dispensing with formality, dispensing with formality is often a courtesy.
Too many people have it drilled into them that "If a job is worth doing, it is worth doing well" when in reality if a job is worth doing, it is often worth doing very badly indeed, because it really, really just needs to be done.
It takes a large amount of very unproductive navel-gazing to assume that a message that unequivocally gives you the information you need, yet that doesn't measure up to your own perceptions of how much effort should have gone into the crafting of the email, is an insult directed at you, rather than a focus on the message rather than the medium.
Even if Marshall McLuhan's dictum is correctly applied to this scenario, the message conveyed by the medium could well be "Stop wasting so much time agonizing over phrasing! Just spit it out!" rather than "I'm better than you so I can get away with sloppy shit that I would excoriate you for."
Speed is a courtesy, sure. I think polish for the sake of polish is bad, and the AI powered polishing is worse. See also: https://x.com/ClickHole/status/2020915972979425699