Testing the limits of civil discourse (and politeness)

Christie Blatchford, National Post:

‘Ahhhh,” my friend Mary said cheerily early one morning this week around the kitchen table where a bunch of us have coffee before our run, “CancerAids.”

I’d been telling the group about the deluge of ghastly email I’ve been receiving about a recent column, and was in mid-description of same when Mary interrupted.

“CancerAids?” the rest of us chorused.

She explained that in the online world with which she is more intimately familiar than the rest of us (she is the hippest of the group), the term is a shorthand dismissal for a troll, a provocateur who writes simply to annoy others or is so manifestly dopey he’s not worth the bother of more time-consuming abuse.

In other words, instead of drearily having to bang out the likes of “What a jerk/why are you saying this/go back to your cave/how stupid are you/I hate you,” you write CancerAids: It is the fate you hope befalls the object of your derision, and by abbreviating your remarks, I suppose, you add an extra measure of scorn.

None of my recent correspondents used the convenient shorthand, alas.

They preferred the oldschool long form, often beginning with detailed descriptions of my admitted physical shortcomings: “You even look like a troll”; “old and worn”; “Never have I seen the ugliness of a person’s soul reflected in a person’s looks as I have in you”; “those glasses are ugly”; “fat cow bitch”, etc.

Many were obscene, the epithet of choice the four-letter C word. Astonishing to me, most of the half-dozen folks who invoked this one used it in the subject line (“You Are a C—”) and had addresses that appeared to contain real names.

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