Content advisory: boneheaded discussion of suicidal ideation by an armchair psychologist
About a decade ago I was friends with a fellow weird unemployed video game nerd lady who liked books and stuff. Had lots in common. Had fun talking over Xbox games and stuff. Was pretty patient with my depressed stuff. Usually.
But I noticed she was pretty often in open conflict with other people. I’m thinking the reason she didn’t get mad at me because I was following her “rules”. I guess we just agreed to disagree sometimes. Later, I realised I was just doing what I usually did in most social situations, walking on eggshells to not annoy people.
Content warning
She “temporarily” blocked me on most venues because I broke one of the rules. You see, I had mentioned razors. She said, essentially, that I should not talk about suicide because she knew what suicidal people were like and I was not suicidal, according to her. She said people shouldn’t be suicidal around her because that made her uncomfortable. (…I wonder what do the suicidal people feel like in that situation, you dum-dum?)
Now, I was deeply depressed at the time (not suicidal, that’s true) and as someone who was walking on eggshells, I tended to look up to most people.
But at that moment, the room was filled with light. For I knew, in my very essence, that this woman was a dumbass.
In the email, I had been talking about Occam’s Razor. Or was it Hanlon’s Razor? Can’t remember. Metaphorical shit. I also I explicitly said this is just metaphorical stuff and she shouldn’t get alarmed.
I couldn’t keep up with her even if I had bothered to. She went through like 3 email addresses and 3 blogs and 3 gamertags due to getting hacked and due to the drama. Don’t know, don’t care. Not nominal people numbers.
Dumb story, wasn’t it?
Native here. I think this is pretty accurate. Politeness is usually tied to other phrasings or modes of speaking, and as an ESL speaker I just think “please” is just a word that gets sprinkled in. In everyday conversations like buying something, it’s kinda more polite to get the thing over with as fast as possible. If you just want a coffee, you don’t need more than “hey” and “thanks” to be nice, right?
That said, it’s definitely not impossible to be explicitly polite: “Ole hyvä”/“Olkaa hyvä” (“[You] (2p. sg./pl.) be kind”) is basically “please” as in “could you do…” or “here you go, have this” or “go ahead and do that” depending on context. “Ole kiltti” (“[You] (2p.sg.) be nice”) is “please” as in “would you be especially kind to do…” But as you can see, these are basically direct orders, it’s “be kind”, not “please be kind”.