Let's try to avoid personal remarks about other Wikipedians. It distracts from the flow of the thread, which ideally should be about ways to craft better articles:
* This particular list is infested with Americans
Excuse me? I'm not a bug! (I put bugs in the software I write, though ;-)
* hot-headed American
If I wear a hat outside, my scalp doesn't heat up so much; usually, I stay inside and enjoy the air-conditioning.
* some rabid nationalist loony * American loonies
Now, now. That's getting personal!
Uncle Ed
Shucks, I guess I needed to follow my own proposal, and mark my posting as being by a natural-born citizen of the USA, attempting to resist the tarring of USA contributors with a loony-brush.
On Tue, 10 Aug 2004 12:45:05 UTC, "Poor, Edmund W" Edmund.W.Poor@abc.com wrote:
...
- This particular list is infested with Americans
Excuse me? I'm not a bug! (I put bugs in the software I write, though ;-)
Clearly I need to avoid this kind of jocular language about classes if people whom I want to hold up as good examples.
- hot-headed American
If I wear a hat outside, my scalp doesn't heat up so much; usually, I stay inside and enjoy the air-conditioning.
Waitaminnit! I never called you hot-headed.
If you publicly dismissed Jens's post as the usual anti-American stuff--that's the context in which I used the phrase--I missed it. And I'd be surprised if it turned out that you did. The point I thought I was making was that a hostile and dismissive response to the post is not necessarily the work of an intellectually dishonest American right-wing chauvinist, but might as easily be a hasty act of annoyance (which I quite share) at a broad-brush accusation. There are hot-heads everywhere, and about (to take an example at random) three times as many in the USA as in Germany, as one can easily determine from the census tables.
- some rabid nationalist loony
- American loonies
Now, now. That's getting personal!
Nah, you're the conservative I mentioned who manages to hold weird political ideas <g> without being a loonie who falsifies evidence. As for loonies and hot-heads, I still think that acknowledging their existence, in both Red and Blue States, not to mention every other place in the world, is better than denying it.
But it's plain that your main point is right: I've got to sober up my rhetoric, at least until I can get the sense across clearly (a skill that Mark Twain had difficulty mastering, so I'm not optimistic).