(Fwd) Private post

Forwarding mail by: ken.friedman@xxxxx (ken.friedman) on Sun,
15 Oct 10:5  PM
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Dear John,

Do me a favor. next time I send you a private post, please keep
it private.  If I'd intended my message for the entire list, I
would have posted it.  People seem to think that the letter I
posted TO you was a post to the list  ABOUT you. Some were not
aware that you elected to post it.

In all the complaints I've received about my supposed support
for Newt and  Bill Buckley, no one seems to consider the
possibility that what I'm really  proposing is the language
equivalent ofg what James Gibson would call an  affordance if
it were a designed object. In other words, I'm proposing the
verbal and literary equivalent of Donald Norman's call for
user-friendly  design. Prose is information as much as a
signage system, an industrial  artifact or a software system.
Asking for user-friendly, understandable  language is not
politics, especially not for the people who are not native
speakers. I've had a lot of friendly mail from them, some of
which you've  seen posted on the list in response to my notes.
I'm not part of the  left-wing American call for politically
correct speech and I'm not part of  the right-wing  American
call for whatever kind of English they're trying  to make the
national language by law. I'm expressing my view an information
 user, and it doesn't seem to me that it's appropriate to
impute  inappropriate political motives to my view.

One may infer from the fact that I live in Norway that I didn't
vote for  Newt. My Prime Minister is not a dead white male.
It's ridiculous to be  dragged into that debate when I'm
talking about something else entirely.

Yours,

Ken