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Mar. 30th, 2006
hey! seattle people!
Mar. 30th, 2006 10:17 amWhat areas of the city have reasonably good transit? We're trying to narrow our search to places where the bus system doesn't suck too badly, because until they let ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tallin drive, getting a car isn't an option.
Anyone who knows of some good apartments available mid-April will earn my eternal gratitude. Or at least cookies. We've tried Craigslist and the other usual suspects, of course...
tallin drive, getting a car isn't an option. Anyone who knows of some good apartments available mid-April will earn my eternal gratitude. Or at least cookies. We've tried Craigslist and the other usual suspects, of course...
communication breakdown
Mar. 30th, 2006 08:02 pmWhen I was in twelfth grade, a thousand years ago, I took a Media Studies class. It was one of the best classes I've ever taken, actually - you can't go wrong with a professor who used Calvin and Hobbes cartoons to demonstrate concepts on the final exam - but the one thing that sticks out to me even now was the definition he gave us of 'effective communication'.
Basic concept: you need a sender and a reciever, and if the reciever doesn't understand the message, then the message might as well be utterly useless.
Case in point. If you use the term 'exceptionalities' to mean 'disabilities', and I don't understand what you mean, then this is a problem. Because my child apparently has 'exceptionalities', you see. It would be nice if I knew what the hell that meant.
There are other terms that annoy me. "Special needs families", for example. The entire family does not have special needs, in most cases - what's wrong with 'families with special needs children'? It's descriptive. It makes sense. It's effective communication.
"Persons who are blind/disabled." PERSONS doesn't fit there. The correct form is PEOPLE. "People who are blind/disabled" just feels really awkward in the mouth, in my opinion.
It shouldn't take me nearly ten minutes to find relevant information on a website because the politically correct verb salad that they're using today was different than the one on yesterday's menu. Is this kind of politically correct language changing anything and I'm just not seeing it? I don't know. I don't see the point of rearranging words, but I've been accused of excessive pragmatism.
Basic concept: you need a sender and a reciever, and if the reciever doesn't understand the message, then the message might as well be utterly useless.
Case in point. If you use the term 'exceptionalities' to mean 'disabilities', and I don't understand what you mean, then this is a problem. Because my child apparently has 'exceptionalities', you see. It would be nice if I knew what the hell that meant.
There are other terms that annoy me. "Special needs families", for example. The entire family does not have special needs, in most cases - what's wrong with 'families with special needs children'? It's descriptive. It makes sense. It's effective communication.
"Persons who are blind/disabled." PERSONS doesn't fit there. The correct form is PEOPLE. "People who are blind/disabled" just feels really awkward in the mouth, in my opinion.
It shouldn't take me nearly ten minutes to find relevant information on a website because the politically correct verb salad that they're using today was different than the one on yesterday's menu. Is this kind of politically correct language changing anything and I'm just not seeing it? I don't know. I don't see the point of rearranging words, but I've been accused of excessive pragmatism.
